DIGITAL LIFE
A group of hackers allegedly got their hands on the phone numbers of around 487 million WhatsApp users belonging to 84 countries. The database was recently offered for sale on a hacker community forum.
With a user base of around 2 billion people, WhatsApp is the largest messaging platform in the world. This means that the database that ended up in the wrong hands contains phone numbers for a quarter of all users on the platform.
Of the 487 million contacts, more than 32 million numbers are from the USA, 45 million from Egypt, 5 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 are UK numbers.
And if you think that this only affects others, then know that the numbers of 2.27 million Portuguese and 8 million Brazilians are there.
WhatsApp data will end up in the wrong hands...According to Cybernews, the seller did not specify how he obtained this database, and suggested that they "use their strategy" to collect the data. It is possible that the hackers did not technically "hack" WhatsApp, but collected the data through "web scraping", which involves running an automated script to confirm on web pages that the numbers are being used by the platform.
There is currently no way to find out if your phone number is in this database. Although Mark Zuckerberg says that WhatsApp is still super secure, you can protect yourself from prying eyes by changing "Last seen and online", "Profile picture" and "About" to "Contacts only" in the app's settings.
mundophone
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