480 million WhatsApp numbers An alleged database containing 487 million users from 84 countries has been put up for sale on a well-known hacker community forum.
The WhatsApp numbers provided in the ad belong to 45 million people in Egypt, 35 million in Italy, 32 million in the US, 29 million in Saudi Arabia, 20 million in France, 20 million in Turkey and more than 11 million in the US.
Regarding data from Latin American countries,
The alleged database has 8 million numbers from Brazil, 2.3 million from Argentina, 2.9 million from Bolivia and more than 17 million from Colombia. More than 6 million from Chile. 1.4 million from Costa Rica, 13 million from Mexico, 10 million from Spain and 1.5 million from Uruguay.
Advertisement published on a well-known hacker forum in November of this year.
480 million WhatsApp numbers The announcement also provides a Telegram account so that interested parties can get in touch.
According to Cybernews , the website that reported the offer on the forum. Researchers analyzed a submitted sample and confirmed that the numbers sold correspond to active WhatsApp users.
Information may be used against users
WhatsApp numbers can be used by cybercriminals to spread scams or carry out phishing attacks with the aim of stealing WhatsApp accounts, among other criminal actions.
It is worth remembering that, in recent turkey whatsapp number list times. We have seen cases in which scammers have tried to steal the verification code to hijack WhatsApp accounts using fake messages pretending to be from the WhatsApp support team, using information about a supposed vaccination appointment or even through sudden messages from unknown numbers requesting a six-digit code.
If victims provide the six-digit code, cybercriminals can take control of their WhatsApp accounts. Criminals often reach out to the victim’s contacts to convince them to request a transfer for a supposed emergency or unforeseen situation. Unfortunately, many people fall for this scam and send money to the criminals, unaware that their contacts have had their accounts stolen.
Meta denies the incident
A spokesperson for Meta , the company that owns WhatsApp. Denied that the incident occurred, as there is no evidence that Meta turkey consumer email list suffered a data leak in its systems. In addition, Meta stressed that it is aware of the post on the forum and that the numbers made available for sale do not contain additional information about the users.
According to the announcement on the hacker forum,
The cybercriminal explains that the data was collect through scraping. Web scraping is the use of tools to extract and/or collect data from websites in order to create a database.
We have seen several cases in the past DT Data where databases containing personal information collected through scraping were expos. For example, when the data of 1.5 billion Facebook users. Was put up for sale or when the data of 500 million LinkedIn users was also sold.
Ideally, users should be aware of the possibility of receiving messages from unknown numbers. If this occurs. It is recommend to block these numbers and not respond to any requests.
