The hacker reportedly wrote a post on a well-known hacker forum on November 16, in which the person in question allegedly obtained the phone numbers of 487 million WhatsApp users from 84 countries. The figures are all from this year, and are for sale.
Internet news Report the matter first, and according to the site it seems to be correct, writes industry today.
It is possible that the person obtained the information through what is called data scraping, which means extracting data from a website without encryption, the site writes.
You are trying to sell numbers
The hacker must have 44.8 million Egyptians, 35.7 million Italians and 32.3 million Americans. Among the Norwegian users, the person concerned must have a total of 475,809 numbers.
In total, there are more than 2 billion monthly active users on the platform, which is owned by Meta.
Among other things, the hacker will sell American numbers for $7,000, British numbers for $2,500 and German numbers for 2,000.
According to Cybernews, this information is mostly used for marketing, attempted fraud, and identity theft. Meta has not yet commented on this matter.
Not the first media storm
The owner of Facebook has been subjected to media storms before. In 2021, the information of more than 500 million Facebook users was leaked.
The biggest scandal occurred in 2018, when it was revealed that consulting firm Cambridge Analytica extracted information on 70 million American Facebook users, which was sold, among other things, to Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign.
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