Hackers claim they have obtained the number of 487 million users WhatsApp in 84 countries, including Italy. The hacking group announced the sale of the data on a hacker community forum (cybernews). With a user base of 2 billion, WhatsApp is the largest messaging platform in the world. This means that the data obtained by the hackers equals 1/4 of the number of users of the app.
WhatsApp in danger: 500 million numbers sold by hackers. What will be the consequences now? Will users switch platforms?
According to the data communicated by the aforementioned portal, out of 487 million desecrated contacts, 32 million come from the United States, 45 million from Egypt, 5 million from Italy, 29 million from Saudi Arabia, 20 million from France and Turkey, 11 million from the United Kingdom, 10 million from Russia and 8 million from Brazil. According to the source, the "seller" did not specify how he obtained the user numbers, but suggested using a particular "strategy". Without a doubt, this is a ploy to get into the user's address books.
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Or, it is possible that the hackers did not invade WhatsApp, but obtained the data through the web scraping technique, which uses automated scripts to collect data used on the Internet. In any case, the method seems to have been quite efficient given the number of contacts obtained. Unfortunately, there is no way to know if our number is on the hacker list. With the sale, the data can be used for spam, scams and phishing and other illegal activities.
It is worth mentioning that earlier this month, the beta version of WhatsApp for Android received a revamped privacy settings section. It makes it easy to apply default temporary message settings to new conversations and timer settings to conversations where the timer is already on. Would it be better to improve security as well?
Through | neowin
