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Home > Cybersecurity > WhatsApp might be facing one of the biggest data breaches in history

WhatsApp might be facing one of the biggest data breaches in history

A hacker is allegedly selling phone numbers of 487 million WhatsApp users from 84 different countries.


Erdem Yasar Erdem Yasar
November 28, 2022
2 min read
WhatsApp might be facing one of the biggest data breaches in history
  • A forum user claims that the phone numbers of 487 million WhatsApp users from 84 different countries are for sale.
  • Among leaked countries, Egypt, Italy, and the USA have the highest number of phone numbers stolen from WhatsApp’s database.
  • Cybersecurity experts are warning users about possible phishing attacks that can target these users soon.

Someone created a post titled “487 million WhatsApp users database” on a popular forum among hackers to sell one of the biggest databases we have ever seen. The hacker claims that the database includes 487 million Whatsapp users’ phone numbers from 2022. The forum user didn’t specify a price for the database but instead shared a Telegram link to contact. Online news sources claim that the hacker is asking for different amounts of money for each country’s dataset.

84 countries

With almost 500 million users’ information, it is one of the biggest datasets ever sold on a hacker forum. WhatsApp currently has approximately 2 billion monthly active users. Thus around 25% of its user base’s information is being sold if the allegations are true. Various users claimed that they tried the phone numbers shared as a sample, 1097 from the U.K. and 817 from the U.S. and they belonged to real active WhatsApp users.

The threat actors didn’t disclose how they obtained the information but they claim that all the phone numbers are from 2022. Meta, the parent company of WhatsApp and Facebook, didn’t make an official announcement yet about the incident. Considering the size of the database, it could be a result of data scraping, which means harvesting huge amounts of information, which is also against WhatsApp’s Terms of Service. The seller also provided a list of the number of datasets belonging to countries:

  1. Egypt: 44,823,547
  2. Italy: 35677,323
  3. USA: 32,315,282
  4. Saudi Arabia: 28,804,686
  5. France: 19,848,559
  6. Turkey: 19,638,821
  7. Morocco: 18,939,198
  8. Colombia: 17,957,908
  9. Iraq: 17,116,398
  10. Africa: 14,323,766

The experts also warned users to be careful against different forms of phishing attacks, such as smishing and vishing. This kind of leaked information is generally used in phishing attacks to steal user credentials.

See more Cybersecurity News


Tags: MetaWhatsApp
Erdem Yasar

Erdem Yasar

Erdem Yasar is a news editor at Cloud7 News. Erdem started his career by writing video game reviews in 2007 for PC World magazine while he was studying computer engineering. In the following years, he focused on software development with various programming languages. After his graduation, he continued to work as an editor for several major tech-related websites and magazines. During the 2010s, Erdem Yasar shifted his focus to cloud computing, hosting, and data centers as they were becoming more popular topics in the tech industry. Erdem Yasar also worked with various industry-leading tech companies as a content creator by writing blog posts and other articles. Prior to his role at Cloud7 News, Erdem was the managing editor of T3 Magazine.

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