WhatsApp data leaked: Nearly 500 million user records put up for sale online

On November 16th, a representative posted an announcement on a popular hacking community forum, claiming to sell its 2022 database of 487 million mobile phone numbers to WhatsApp users.

The dataset is said to contain his WhatsApp user data from 84 countries. The attackers claim to list over 32 million US user records.

Another majority of phone numbers belong to citizens of Egypt (45 million), Italy (35 million), Saudi Arabia (29 million), France (20 million) and Turkey (20 million).

The dataset for sale is said to also contain the phone numbers of some 10 million Russians and his over 11 million British citizens.

A threat officer told Cybernews that the US data he sells for $7,000, the UK for $2,500, and Germany for $2,000.

Attackers often use such information in phishing and phishing attacks, so it's a good idea to be on the lookout for calls, spam, and messages from unknown numbers.

It is reported that WhatsApp has more than two billion monthly active users worldwide.

Upon request, the WhatsApp database vendor shared sample data with Cybernews researchers. There were 1,097 British and 817 American user numbers in the combined sample.

Cybernews has investigated all the figures in the sample and has been able to confirm that they are all, in fact, WhatsApp users.

The seller did not elaborate on how he obtained the database, saying he "used his strategy" to collect the data and confirmed to Cybernews that all the numbers in this case belong to active WhatsApp users.

Cyber wing contacted parent company WhatsApp Meta but received no immediate response. We will update the article as soon as we know more.

Information about WhatsApp users can be obtained through large-scale profiling, also known as scraping, which violates the WhatsApp Terms of Service.

This statement is purely speculative. Most often, however, big data dumps posted on the web are obtained through parsing.