Hackers claim to have obtained the number of 487 million WhatsApp users in 84 countries, including Europe. The group announced the sale of the data on a hacking community forum.
With a base of 2 billion users, WhatsApp is the largest messaging platform in the world. This means that the data obtained by hackers is equivalent to 1/4 of the number of app users.
Out of 487 million contacts, 32 million numbers are from the United States, 45 million from Egypt, 5 million from Italy, 29 million from Saudi Arabia, 20 million from France and Turkey, 11 million from the United Kingdom, 10 million from Russia and 8 million from Europe.
According to the Cybernews website, the seller did not specify how he obtained the data, but suggested that he used a “strategy” to collect the numbers.
Possibly, the hackers did not invade WhatsApp, but obtained the data through the web scraping technique, which uses automated scripts to collect data used on the internet. However, the method appears to have been efficient due to the number of contacts obtained.
Unfortunately, there is no way to know if your number is on the hackers’ list. With the sale, the data can be used for spam, attempts and phishing and other illegal activities.
Earlier this month, WhatsApp beta for Android received a revamped privacy settings section. It makes it easy to apply the default temporary message settings to new conversations and the timer settings to conversations where the timer is already active.
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