A hacker is selling a database containing nearly 500 million WhatsApp user phones from around the world, including Peru .
WhatsApp is the most used instant messaging app in Latin America and several other countries in the world, including our country. Unfortunately, this popularity causes cybercriminals to focus on their users’ data and this case proves it. A new report reveals that a hacker is selling the phone numbers of nearly 500 million users around the world, including more than 8 million from Peru .
The cybersecurity portal Cybernews mentions that on November 16, a user posted a notice on a well-known Internet hacker forum stating that he was selling an updated database until 2022 made up of some 487 million WhatsApp user phone numbers that They come from 84 countries around the globe.
The phone numbers of millions of WhatsApp users for sale
The author indicated the approximate amount of user data according to his country.
Waiting for a response from Meta
Meta , the company that owns WhatsApp , has been criticized in the past for allowing third parties to scrape or collect user data. Previously, more than 533 million users’ phone numbers were leaked in a forum similar to the one in this case and, what is worse, the actor shared the data set practically for free. The data leaked in this new attack could be used for marketing, phishing or fraud purposes.
“In this day and age, we all leave a sizable digital footprint, and tech giants like Meta should take every precaution and means to safeguard that data. We should ask ourselves if an added clause of ‘no scraping or abuse of the platform is allowed on ‘Terms and Conditions’ is enough. Threat actors don’t care about those terms, so companies should take rigorous measures to mitigate threats and prevent platform abuse from a technical standpoint ,” said Mantas Sasnauskas. , head of the Cybernews investigative team .