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WhatsApp – the world's most popular messaging app with over a billion users – has suffered one of the biggest data breaches in history. The massive WhatsApp data breach may affect 500 million people, according to reports.
The data leak, which was first seen in a popular hackers' forum, is believed to be the largest in WhatsApp's history. The database contains private phone numbers from different countries including Germany, the UK, Egypt, and the United States.
This is a massive concern for millions of users who are now exposed to potential social engineering schemes like phishing, investment scams, and romance scams.
More than 32 million of the leaked records are said to be from users in the US, with 11 million from UK users. Other affected nations include Egypt (45 million), Italy (35 million), Saudi Arabia (29 million), France (20 million), Turkey (20 million), and Russia (10 million).
Interestingly, the hacker who claims to have the data claims to sell the data set depending on the country of origin. The US data set is said to go for $7,000, and the UK numbers up for a similar per-capita figure of $2,500.
This data can easily be purchased by scammers and can be used for all kinds of malicious activities such as vishing and smishing. Hackers have been distributing these files freely among themselves.
It is unclear how these numbers were obtained, but WhatsApp has come out to deny the data breach. News of the leak started surfacing on the 16th of November 2022 and spread like a bushfire on the dark web.
But a WhatsApp spokesperson denied the leak saying there is no evidence of a data leak from WhatsApp. He mentioned that the data leak, first claimed by Cybernews, is based on unsubstantiated screenshots.
The spokesperson further claimed that the alleged data is from the 2019 Facebook leak.
Meta, the parent company of WhatsApp and Facebook, has seen its fair share of data breaches. In the past, Facebook users' personal data was allegedly leaked which included phone numbers and other details. Therefore, it would be wise to be wary of being targeted by scams as the alleged WhatsApp leak supposedly contains names of users in addition to phone numbers. Scammers who know both these things about you can make their scams seem more believable.
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