WhatsApp Numbers of 500 Million Users Sold, Twitter User Data Leaked
WhatsApp’s mobile phone number database of around 487 million users has reportedly been sold on a public hacking forum. These numbers are said to belong to WhatsApp users from 84 countries, from the latest database. The hacker is said to have used a method called scraping to collect the personal information of these WhatsApp users. Meanwhile, data from previous Twitter data breaches has been posted online. The leak is said to include users’ personal information including their Twitter handle, account name, username, location, phone numbers, and email addresses.
according to a reports Via Cybernews, a user posted an ad on a popular hacking forum to sell the mobile numbers of 487 million WhatsApp users. The hacker claims to have got his hands on a database of over 32 million US users’ numbers worth $7,000 (roughly Rs. 5,70,000), according to the report.
Similarly, the numbers of about 45 million users in Egypt and about 35 million users in Italy are also reported to be for sale. The letter says it was able to find and verify 1097 UK numbers and 817 US numbers from the hacker. A person he might have used a process called scraping, gathering public information, to get these numbers. These leaked phone numbers can be used for marketing purposes, phishing, impersonation, and fraud.
“The claim written in Cybernews is based on unsubstantiated screenshots. There is no evidence of a ‘data leak’ on WhatsApp,” a WhatsApp spokesperson told Gadgets 360.
Meanwhile, the details of about 5.4 million Twitter users that were for sale earlier this year have now been leaked on an online forum.
according to a reports With BleepingComputer, Twitter may have experienced an even bigger data breach, potentially affecting a large number of users. This new data breach may contain the information of tens of millions of Twitter users, including their phone numbers, according to the report. It may have happened due to the same API bug that led to the previous leak. It is reported that this information it was revealed by security analyst Chad Loder on Twitter. However, the researcher’s account has been suspended, which seems to have forced Loder to upload corrected information Entering Mastodon.
BleepingComputer says it was able to obtain a data dump of 1,377,132 French mobile numbers included in the targeted Twitter data breach. Notably, these numbers were not included in the previously sold data of 5.4 million Twitter users. The new data breach is said to include several files classified by country and region codes, including Europe, the USA, and Israel. It may contain more than 17 million leaked records.
