The hacker reportedly wrote a post on a well-known hacker forum on Nov. 16, where the person in question is claimed to have obtained the phone numbers of 487 million WhatsApp users from 84 countries. The issues are all from this year, and are for sale.
Cybernews reported the matter before, and according to the website it appears to be true, he writes Industry today.
The person probably obtained the information through so-called data scraping, which means extracting data from a website without coding, the website writes.
Trying to sell the numbers
The hacker should have the numbers of 44.8 million Egyptians, 35.7 million Italians and 32.3 million Americans. Among Norwegian users, the data subject must have a total of 475,809 numbers.
In total, there are over two billion monthly active users on the platform, which is owned by Meta.
Among other things, the hacker will sell US numbers for $7,000, UK numbers for $2,500 and German numbers for $2,000.
According to Cybernews, this information is mainly used for marketing, fraud attempts and identity theft. Meta has so far not commented on the matter.
It is not the first media storm
The Facebook owner has already been caught up in media storms. In 2021, the information of more than 500 million Facebook users was leaked.
The biggest scandal occurred in 2018, when it was revealed that consultancy Cambridge Analytica mined information on 70 million American Facebook users, which was, among other things, sold to Donald Trump’s election campaign in 2016.
