San Francisco: WhatsApp phone numbers of around half a billion have been stolen and put on sale on a hacking community forum, according to a report by Cybernews. The stolen data could be sold or used for marketing or phishing.

A report by Cybernews stated the stolen dataset allegedly contains WhatsApp users data from 84 countries around the world, including India. It also said the hacker was selling the US dataset for $ 7,000, the UK for $2,500 and Germany for $ 2,000.

The report shared the details of numbers of users whose data had been breached.

US: 32 million users
UK: 11 million
Russia: 10 million
Egypt: 45 million
Italy: 35 million
Saudi Arabia: 29 million
France: 20 million
Turkey: 20 million

WhatsApp has not commented on this ‘data breach’ yet. Cybernews said it received a sample of around 2,000 numbers to verify the data breach claims and found that they belonged to WhatsApp users. The researchers found that all of them were active WhatsApp users.

#WhatsApp #dataleak: 500 million user records for sale. The #threat actor told @CyberNews they were selling the #US #dataset for $7,000, the #UK – $2,500, and #Germany – $2,000. Check if your country has been affected. Read more: https://t.co/YT8CwV2cLo #cybersecurity #infosec pic.twitter.com/ZsfakpLC3A
— CyberNews (@CyberNews) November 26, 2022