A hacker is offering nearly a 500 million cell phone numbers of WhatsApp users for sale on the dark web. The numbers were presumably obtained through scraping. Meta, WhatsApp's parent company, did not want to comment on the incident.
reports Cybernews (1).
The tech site saw someone on the dark web (2) offering for sale a database containing 487 million phone numbers. According to the seller, the database is current -it dates back to 2022 - and contains the phone numbers of WhatsApp users from 84 countries.
Cybernews editors asked the seller if they could get a sample from the database to determine its authenticity. The seller handed over phone numbers of 817 Americans and 1,097 Britons. The tech site tested all the numbers and they were indeed found to belong to WhatsApp users.
Aside from the phone numbers, the database contains no other data, such as names or e-mail addresses. The vendor would not say how he or she obtained the numbers. Cybernews suggests that the data may have been obtained through scraping. In scraping, a software program automatically collects desired data from public sources, such as social media (3), blogs and personal Web sites.
The person selling the database on the dark web has made an inventory of the number of phone numbers per country. This shows that the telephone numbers of 5,430,388 Dutch people have been captured. For our southern neighbors, it involves 3,183,584 numbers. In Germany, it involves just over 6 million phone numbers of Whats-App users.
Phone numbers are often used by hackers and cybercriminals for phishing (4) and identity fraud (5). They often combine the number with other personal information, which comes from previous data breaches at companies or purchased over the dark web.
The aggregation of data makes the fraud appear all the more credible. With a personalized salutation, mention of an actual service or product the victim is using, and a personalized and grammatically correct message, gullible people are more likely to fall for the scams of malicious people.
The database has been offered since Nov. 16. The ad states that interested parties can contact the seller via Telegram. As far as we know, the dataset has not yet been sold.
This is not the first time so much Meta users' data has ended up on the dark web. In April 2021, the data of 533 million Facebook users (6) surfaced on a hacker forum on the dark web. In addition to first and last names, the perpetrators also managed to get their hands on residences, dates of birth, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, gender, relationship status, Facebook IDs and the dates the accounts were created. A total of 5.4 Dutch people and 3.2 million Belgians were affected by the data breach.
According to Facebook, the data had been stolen years ago and the systems have since been restored and modified. Then a spokesperson said the data had not been stolen by a hacking attack, but had been collected using scraping software. Finally, Facebook tried to dismiss the incident as an industry problem (7).
The social network spokesperson said she did not notify victims of the data breach because she did not know exactly who the victims were.
https://cybernews.com/news/whatsapp-data-leak/
https://www.vpngids.nl/privacy/anoniem-browsen/wat-is-het-dark-web/
https://www.vpngids.nl/privacy/social-media/
https://www.vpngids.nl/veilig-internet/cybercrime/wat-is-phishing/
https://www.vpngids.nl/
https://www.vpngids.nl/nieuws/privegegevens-533-miljoen-facebook-gebruikers-op-straat/
https://www.vpngids.nl/nieuws/facebook-wil-scraping-bestempelen-als-sectorprobleem/
