WhatsApp data stolen - 500 million users are said to be affected
Created: 11/24/2022, 6:53 p.m
By: Julia Volkenand
Millions of WhatsApp records are said to have been stolen.
© Silas Stein/Imago;
Thiago Prudencio/Imago;
Collage: Sabrina Wagner/RUHR24
The data of 500 million WhatsApp users is said to have been stolen and put up for sale.
Huge numbers of people are also affected in Germany.
Munich – The messenger giant WhatsApp sends encrypted messages and therefore has a reputation among users for being particularly secure.
According to a report by cybernews.com, however, the big mess is said to have happened.
The data of 500 million customers are said to have been stolen, including cell phone numbers.
According to the report, unknown persons are currently offering users' cell phone numbers for sale on a well-known hacking website.
According to the “seller”, the data comes from 84 countries, including the USA.
Egyptian users are said to have been particularly hard hit, from where 45 million data sets originate.
There are said to be over 6 million cell phone numbers from Germany too.
WhatsApp: Hacker is said to have stolen 500 million cell phone numbers - six million in Germany alone
The Cybernews platform did a data comparison and found the story to be probably true.
The hacker had provided a sample of the cell phone numbers and lo and behold: All numbers were actually on WhatsApp.
He did not reveal exactly how the seller got the numbers, but he used "his own strategy".
The industry service therefore suspects that it may have gotten to the data through so-called scraping.
Data from online providers is read out and stored, a process that violates WhatsApp's terms of use.
WhatsApp leak: Meta is initially silent
Meta, WhatsApp's parent company, which also owns Facebook, has not yet commented when asked.
Leaked phone numbers could be used for marketing purposes, phishing and scams.
All the worse if Meta's safety precautions were actually not sufficient.