KARACHI: Almost half a billion WhatsApp records have been breached by and are up for sale at a well-known hacking community forum.
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According to multiple reports, an actor posted an ad on a well-known hacking community forum, claiming they were selling a 2022 database of 487 million WhatsApp user mobile numbers, which contains data from 84 countries.
This means that almost one-quarter of all WhatsApp’s estimated two billion monthly active users are possible at risk. WhatsApp is reported to have more than two billion monthly active users globally.
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The dataset allegedly contains WhatsApp user data from 84 countries. Threat actor claims there are over 32 million US user records included.
Another huge chunk of phone numbers belongs to the citizens of Egypt (45 million), Italy (35 million), Saudi Arabia (29 million), France (20 million), and Turkey (20 million).
The dataset for sale also allegedly has nearly 10 million Russian and over 11 million UK citizens’ phone numbers.
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It seems that individual countries’ data is up for grabs, with the US dataset up for $7,000, and British numbers up for a similar per-capita figure of $2,500. Most alarmingly, it doesn’t seem to be an empty promise designed to threaten the Meta-owned company, with almost 2,000 numbers shared with a website in a sample request verified to be WhatsApp users.
