According to a News Report there is an alleged incident of WhatsApp Data Leak and Nearly 500 Million User Records for Sale on the Dark Web.
A data sample examined by CyberNews confirms that someone is allegedly selling up-to-date mobile phone numbers of nearly 500 million WhatsApp users.
Leaked phone numbers could be used for marketing purposes, phishing, impersonation, and fraud.
On November 16, an actor posted an advertisement on a well-known hacking community forum, claiming that they were selling a database of 487 million WhatsApp user mobile numbers.
The dataset reportedly includes WhatsApp user data from 84 countries. The threat actor claims it contains over 32 million US user records.
The threat actor told CyberNews they were selling the US dataset for $7,000, the UK for $2,500 and Germany for $2,000.
How was the data obtained?
The seller did not specify how they obtained the database, suggesting they “used their strategy” to collect the data, and assured that all the numbers in the sample dataset belong to active WhatsApp users.
The information on WhatsApp users could be obtained by harvesting information at scale, also known as scraping, which violates WhatsApp’s Terms of Service.
Whatever the method used, the damage that can be caused by this leakage should not be taken lightly.
Source: WhatsApp data leak: 500 million user records for sale