Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao has warned users about an upcoming wave of phishing scams as hackers are selling up-to-date mobile phone numbers of nearly 500 million WhatsApp users.
In Sunday’s tweet, Zhao, who goes by the name CZ on Twitter, Told Over 487 million WhatsApp phone numbers are up for sale on the dark web. They claimed that the numbers are legit and that users may be set up to receive phishing links and scam messages.
“A new set of 487 million WhatsApp phone numbers for sale in the dark web. A sample indicates the phone numbers are legitimate. Please be vigilant as threat actors will use this data to run smishing (phishing message) campaigns, ” They said.
According to a report by CyberNews, a hacker deployment of numbers on a well-known hacking community forum on November 16, claiming that they were an up-to-date database of 487 million WhatsApp user mobile numbers.
The dataset reportedly contains WhatsApp user numbers from 84 countries. The largest share of phone numbers belong to citizens of Egypt (45 million), Italy (35 million), the United States (32 million), Saudi Arabia (29 million), France (20 million) and Turkey (20 million).
The threat actors reportedly told CyberNews they were selling the US dataset for $7,000, the UK for $2,500 and Germany for $2,000. The media also claimed that the vendor shared a sample of the data with them, and they were able to confirm the validity of the numbers.
WhatsApp is reported to have over 2 billion monthly active users globally. The messaging app has been ranked among the most popular mobile messenger apps in the world.
massive whatsapp data leak
While the hackers did not specify how they obtained the database, suggesting that they “used their own tactics” to collect the data, CyberNews speculated that the information could have been obtained by mass gathering information. Also known as scraping.
According to WhatsApp, scraping is the use of an automated tool for collecting and harvesting information on a large scale for any non-permitted purpose. Scrapers may attempt to extract and save user information from the WhatsApp platform, including phone numbers, user profile pictures, and statuses.
Notably, this is not the only massive data leak related to WhatsApp or other Meta companies. Back in April 2021, the personal information of 533 million Facebook users worldwide reappeared on a hacker website.
Experts have long criticized Meta for allowing third parties to scrape or collect user data.
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