Nearly 500 M WhatsApp Users were caught in a Cyber Attack.

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WhatsApp again caught up in the attack and was involved in the breach of numbers of nearly 500 M WhatsApp users. How did that happen, and who was behind this? Let’s talk about that in this news you’re going to read.

500 M a Big Count!

As you know, most population is covered by the Social Media App WhatsApp; then you can estimate the big amount of which people who downloaded and installed this application on their phones.

16, Nov, 2022

Adversary shared an ad over a well-known hacking community forum while claiming they were offering a 2022 database involving WhatsApp Mobile Numbers related to “487 M” Users. An amount of 84 nations is involved in the database, which is on sale.

According to adversaries,

In the databases, 32 million records were related to the U.S.

Other loads of numbers from this database included:

45 Million Egypt
35 Million Italy
29 Million Saudi Arabia
20 Million France
20 Million Turkey
10 Million Russian
11 Million UK Citizens

Cybernews

Adversaries are selling datasets of every nation in a different price range.

$7,000 U.S. Datasets
$2,500 U.K. Datasets
$2,000 Germany Datasets

Adversaries use such data to run smishing and vishing attacks on victims. Our suggestion for users is to be cautious of unknown calls, unsolicited calls, and messages.

In records, 2 Billion Monthly Users globally are mentioned on WhatsApp.

On a request, WhatsApp Database’s adversaries shared a sample of data with “Cybernews Researchers.” The sample included 1097 UK and 817 US WhatsApp Contacts.

After verifying all contacts, it was confirmed that all of those were genuine and active.

Adversaries didn’t explain how they get to the databases. They might have some secretive strategies to get the collection of data, and they assured Cybernews all collected data was related to active WhatsApp Users.

Even after getting to the Parent Company of WhatsApp (Meta), they (Cybernews) didn’t get any response. If we get any clues in the future, we’ll update the details here ASAP.

Well, there are several potential skillful people that can use their wits to breach data from any place. Even WhatsApp is not an exception. Harvesting Information could be one of the reasons, aka scraping. Well, that break the laws and T&C of WhatsApp.

Meta even criticized the management for leaving the scope for adversaries to collect users’ data after seeing a total count of 533 Million Users’ Records shared on a dark forum. Moreover, the adversary was selling datasets even for free of cost.

This massive disturbance was fired up after two more incidents that included a Massive Facebook Data Leak,

and a 500 Million LinkedIn Profiles breach,

which was put on sale by adversaries.

Mantas Sasnauskas, Head of the Research Team, Cybernews

“In this age, we all leave a sizeable digital footprint – and tech giants like Meta should take all precautions and means to safeguard that data,”.

“We should ask whether an added clause of ‘scraping or platform abuse is not permitted in the Terms and Conditions is enough.

In the eyes of adversaries, such terms have no chance. That’s why some serious steps need to be taken against unknown threats, and it’ll help platforms from becoming the victims of such attacks.

For precautions, users should learn about security practices. Moreover, they can even use VPN and get a trustable anti-virus program. For a better understanding, users can look up the following video.