The Cybernews portal allows you to check if your phone number or email address was compromised in the massive WhatsApp data leak.
WhatsApp suffered a new massive data breach a few days ago, which ended up exposing the phone numbers of almost 500 million accounts, as well as 2.5 billion emails from users around the world. In the specific case of Peru , the Cybernews portal- who discovered and reported the cyberattack – revealed that more than 8 million people were affected.
Although WhatsApp indicated that it does not consider that its platform has been hacked to obtain user information, the truth is that the database began to be sold through some of the most popular hacking forums on the Internet , exposing the accounts vulnerable to smishing and vishing attacks .
How to know if I was affected by the WhatsApp data leak?
It is important to note that due to the volume of compromised accounts, it is quite likely that we have been affected by this attack without even realizing it. Fortunately, Cybernews , the cybersecurity portal that reported the leak and sale of data in hacking forums, has a tool capable of informing us if our information was part of this breach.
“Our tester has a 500GB database of hashed leaked emails,” Cybernews says on its page. If you want to consult the tool, you just have to enter the following link and follow these instructions:
- Type your email address or phone number into the search box.
- Press ‘Check Now’.
- Check the search results and check.
After this, Cybernews will give you a few recommendations to keep your credentials safe, such as changing your email password or applying new security methods for your phone number.
The phone numbers of millions of WhatsApp users for sale
Cybernews indicated the approximate amount of user data based on your country. Among the nations with the most leaked phone numbers are Egypt (44 million), Italy (35 million), the United States (32 million), Saudi Arabia (28 million) and France (19 million). In the specific case of our country, the cybercriminal indicates that there are 8,075,317 telephone numbers of Peruvian users in said database.
The Cybernews firm states in its report that it was able to verify the authenticity of the data sold by the hacker based on a sample that was provided by the same author (1097 phones from the United Kingdom and 817 from the United States ). The seller did not reveal how he managed to obtain all these numbers and only suggested that he used a strategy to collect them, ensuring that absolutely all of them belong to active WhatsApp users .
The author of the report mentions that the information about WhatsApp users could have been obtained by collecting information at scale ( scraping ), a technique that goes against the terms of service of the app. However, since there is no way to verify this, this is just speculation based on previous cases where massive data posted online was obtained in this way.