WhatsApp is one of the most popular applications in the world. Every day, billions of people communicate through this application. But popularity brings with it some security problems. A new report suggests that someone has hacked WhatsApp and stolen the personal information of around 500 million users.

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The personal information of 500 million WhatsApp users is up for sale

According to the latest report from Cybernews, an actor posted an ad in a hacking community forum to sell the data of over 487 million WhatsApp users, including their mobile numbers. The listing also claims that data consists of users from 84 different countries and includes user data of 32 million users from the USA. The list of compromised information also contains user data from countries like Egypt, Italy, Saudi Arabia, France, and Turkey. 

Hackers even created a price list for the personal information in question. For example, the WhatsApp user database in the US sells for $7,000. The UK’s database is $2,500, and Germany’s is $2,000. Unfortunately, leaked phone numbers can be used for many different scams. Relatively older users, in particular, are at great risk.

Meta, the umbrella company of WhatsApp, has not yet made a statement. Everyone is wondering, “how did hackers get this information?”. The application is protected by end-to-end encryption and stands out with its security. However, the incident led to the thought that WhatsApp is not secure.

Also, it is currently speculated that the WhatsApp data of around 500 million has been obtained using web scraping or web harvesting, where an automated data tool is used to collect data from a specific service, which violates WhatsApp’s terms of service. Unfortunately, we can’t share definitive information until an official statement from the company is received.

(Source: Cybernews)

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