The phone numbers of nearly 500 million WhatsApp users are for sale on the Dark Web. France is strongly affected. And this leak should lead to major phishing campaigns…
The troubles continue for Meta, the parent company of Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and Messenger! The company’s platforms are very regularly targeted by cyberattacks from hackers because of the phenomenal amount of personal data they abound in – data that is resold at exorbitant prices on the Dark Web and used to set up vast campaigns. of phishing. Only a few days ago, Meta discovered during an internal investigation that its own employees were selling user accounts to hackers. This time, data containing the numbers of 487 million active WhatsApp instant messaging users has leaked. According to cyber news, a hacker recently put them up for sale on a very popular dark web hacking forum. The data comes from 84 countries, including France, which is particularly affected.
WhatsApp: the numbers of 500 million users on the Dark Web
The database recovered by the hacker therefore concerns more than a quarter of the 2 billion WhatsApp users worldwide. A figure that has cause for concern! According to the announcement on the forum, the phone data concerns more than 32 million users in the United States, 45 million in Egypt, 35 million in Italy, 29 million in Saudi Arabia and Turkey, 10 million in Russia and 11 million in the UK. As for France, more than 20 million people are affected… Cybernews journalists asked to see this data, and the hacker graciously provided them with a sample of 1,097 telephone numbers from the United Kingdom. United and 817 US users. Upon reviewing them, they actually discovered that all belong to currently active users.
On the other hand, the pirate did not specify how he had obtained all these numbers. Several hypotheses are possible. The first is that he resorted to scraping, a method which consists of massively collecting, over the long term, data itself from other databases put up for sale on the Web – following other leaks , hacks or other phishing campaigns. Incidentally, the forum where the ad was posted is full of threads mentioning WhatsApp accounts for sale. It is also possible that the platform has been hacked and that Meta has not yet reacted publicly.
In any case, a database of this size is a bad sign for affected users, who could well find themselves, in the coming months, targeted by a large-scale phishing campaign or inundated with spam. That’s why it’s important to remember never to click or tap on a link sent by email, text or messaging whose origin is not known – and again, hackers are very good at imitating organizations and businesses. For the moment, it is impossible to know who is concerned. But for those who want to limit the data visible to a hacker with access to your WhatsApp account, just go to the application settings, then to the Privacy section and lock as many options as possible.