Half a Billion people with WhatsApp might be Getting Spam and Scams.

A database containing the phone numbers of a quarter of all WhatsApp users was recently put up for sale on a hacker community forum. it contains 487 million phone numbers belonging to active Whatsapp users in 84 countries.


WhatsApp might be Getting Spam and Scams

According to the poster, it contained 32 million US user phone numbers (10% of WhatsApp's usage base), 45 million Egyptian user phone numbers, 35 million Italian user phone numbers, and 29 million Saudi Arabian user phone numbers.

A source (via Cybernews) noted that they were able to gain access to "half a billion phone numbers of active WhatsApp users." The site didn't say how they got the data. It is possible that they built their database by scraping, which entails gathering data from websites. In other words, this particular hacker group was collecting phone numbers from specific web pages and then used those hits to build a list of 500 million confirmed WhatsApp contacts.

A database of phone numbers could be used for spam, phishing attempts, or even worse. There's really no way of knowing if your phone number is in there and it can't be deleted. But if you want to protect WhatsApp-related data including your profile picture and status updates from possible prying eyes who may have gotten a hold of your phone number, you can update these settings through the "Settings" section.


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