WhatsApp phone numbers of 487 million users have been stolen and put on sale on a “well-known” hacking community forum, the media reported. According to Cybernews, the dataset allegedly contains WhatsApp user data from 84 countries and phone numbers of over 32 million users from the US, 11 million from the UK, and 10 million from Russia.
It is really unbelievable how people continue to use wa, especially for work (which is very serious), without bothering to check whether data protection regulations are being followed, especially by the controller (that is WhatsApp). What has happened shows how high the risks are for users’ personal data who are not given control over their data. Join our awareness campaign on the conscious and correct use of IM apps that respect data protection and privacy.
This article states that this information comes from Cybernews. I think it’s from this article: https://cybernews.com/news/whatsapp-data-leak/ The precise number of phone numbers leaked per country is presented in a table. This same Cybernews article also writes about their article from last year mentionning a 533 million users Facebook leak. https://cybernews.com/news/leaker-says-they-are-offering-private-details-of-500-million-facebook-users/ In this article from 2021, there is a forum screenshot where the phone numbers leaked by country are exactly the same as the ones listed in the table from this year’s article. You won’t make me believe the data is different from last year.
As the 533 million phone numbers were available for free since last year, in my opinion a random scammer downloaded it and reposted it now, trying to make a quick and easy profit. He just scrapped some countries to cut down a little the total number. I supposed he did this to not look too suspicious.
However, the hacker did not specify how they obtained the data, suggesting they “used their strategy,” and that all the numbers belong to WhatsApp users, said the report.
lol
What is concerning here is the lack of analysis from Cybernews. They publish two articles in a year about a Facebook leak, they link the two articles but they fail to at least compare pictures in them.
https://cybernews.com/about-us/
Cybernews.com is a research-based online publication
lol
https://cybernews.com/editorial-policy/
We maintain and uphold the values of journalistic integrity, reliability, objectivity
We produce professional, unbiased, and reliable content
No they don’t. They create an article in 2022 without mentionning the leaked data is from 2019 while all the necessary data for them to arrive at this conclusion is on their website. They publish data, not information. This is not journalism.
And BGR.in only seems to be able to make a poor copy and paste.
I downvote this post due to the terrible quality of the article.
We retrieved the article from the Internet and didn’t write it. We seemed that news interesting. Feel free to do what you want, even to downvote it
