WhatsApp: hacker would have in his possession the data of almost 500 million users

A hacker claimed to have the phone numbers of more than 487 million people, who are also users of WhatsApp. The database was published on November 16 by the cybercriminal.

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According to Cybernews, a user revealed in a “well-known hacker community forum” that was putting up for sale 487 million mobile phones of “WhatsApp users”.

The leaked data belongs to WhatsApp users from 84 countries. The hacker claimed that “there are more than 32 million US user records included”. Likewise, 45 million numbers are from people from Egypt35 million from Italy, 29 million from Saudi Arabia, 20 million from France and finally 20 million from Turkey.

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“The data set for sale supposedly also has almost 10 million phone numbers of Russian citizens and over 11 million from the UK”added the medium.

In this regard, WhatsApp has not confirmed anything, while on the other hand, it is not known how the hacker got the numbers. Cybernews contacted the attacker, who claimed to be selling the information from the United States for US$ 7,000US$2,500 for the UK data and US$2,000 for the German data.

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The medium suggests that the hacker would have obtained said data by using a technique called ‘web scraping’, which consists of extracting data from web pages using web software programs.

Source: Elcomercio

Callum

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