"Experts Investigate WhatsApp Data Leak: 500M User Records for Sale"

On November 16, an actor advertised a 2022 database of 487 million WhatsApp user mobile numbers on a well-known hacking community forum. The data set is said to contain WhatsApp user data from 84 different countries. According to the threat actor, there are over 32 million US user records included in the data set. Significant portions of the phone numbers belong to the citizens of Egypt (45 million), Italy (35 million), Saudi Arabia (29 million), France (20 million), and Turkey (20 million). The data set for sale also allegedly contains the phone numbers of nearly 10 million Russians and more than 11 million UK citizens. The threat actor told Cybernews that they were selling the US data set for $7,000, the UK data set for $2,500, and the German data set for $2,000. Since attackers commonly use such information in smishing and vishing attacks, users should be suspicious of any calls from unknown numbers, as well as unsolicited calls and messages. According to reports, WhatsApp has more than two billion monthly active users worldwide. The seller of WhatsApp's database provided a sample of data to Cybernews researchers upon request. The shared sample included 1,097 UK and 817 US user numbers. Cybernews investigated all of the numbers in the sample and confirmed that they are all WhatsApp users. The seller did not specify how they obtained the database, only stating that they collected the data using their strategy, and assured Cybernews that all of the numbers in the instance belong to active WhatsApp users. The information on WhatsApp users could have been obtained by mass data harvesting, also known as scraping, which is a violation of WhatsApp's Terms of Service. Massive data dumps posted online are often obtained through scraping. This article continues to discuss the WhatsApp data leak.

Security Affairs reports "Experts Investigate WhatsApp Data Leak: 500M User Records for Sale"