Nearly 500m user records 'up for sale' after WhatsApp data breach

A post on a "well-known hacking community forum" claims that almost half a billion WhatsApp records have been breached and are up for sale.

The post claims to be selling an up-to-date database of 487 million mobile numbers used on WhatsApp from 84 countries.

If true, approximately 500 million WhatsApp users could be vulnerable to having their personal information stolen.

More than 32 million of the leaked records are said to be from users in the US, with 11 million from UK users. Other affected nations include Egypt, Italy, Saudi Arabia, France, Türkiye, and Russia.

It seems that individual countries' data is available for purchase, with the US dataset available for $7,000, and British numbers available for a similar per-capita figure of $2,500.

This does not seem to be an empty promise to threaten the Meta-owned company. Almost 2,000 numbers have been shared with Cybernews in a sample request, and these numbers have been verified to be WhatsApp users.

The leak of phone numbers could be used for marketing or phishing scams, which highlights the importance of a good ID theft protection tool.

This is not the first time that WhatsApp has been in the news for data security issues, and although it is not the only app with this problem, but it has a history of security vulnerabilities and scams.

Meta was not immediately available for comment.