Half a billion WhatsApp users potentially exposed to spam and scams - SamMobile - Samsung news

A database containing the phone numbers of one-quarter of all WhatsApp users was recently put up for sale on a hacking community forum.

The seller claims that the database was recent and contained 487 million phone numbers belonging to active WhatsApp users in 84 countries.

WhatsApp has a user base of around 2 billion, which means that this database supposedly contains the phone numbers of one-quarter of WhatsApp users.

According to the poster, the database contains the phone numbers of over 32 million users in the USA, 45 million from Egypt, 35 million from Italy, 29 million from Saudi Arabia, 20 million (each) from France and Turkey, 10 million phone numbers from Russian users, and over 11 million UK numbers.

The source (via Cybernews) didn’t reveal how they obtained half a billion phone numbers of active WhatsApp users but said that they “used their strategy.” Nevertheless, it is possible that the database was put together through a process known as “scraping,” which involves data gathering from websites.

In other words, WhatsApp wasn’t hacked, but these bad actors may have gathered nearly 500 million phone numbers from web pages, confirmed that they are used for WhatsApp, and put them up for sale.

Samsung Galaxy Tab Active 4 Pro

Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 LTE

Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 44mm LTE