More than 3 million Belgian mobile numbers for sale online due to huge WhatsApp leak | Tech

The specialized website Cybernews examined the data and checked whether US and UK numbers from the leak match WhatsApp users, and that is correct. In total, this concerns 487 million numbers, while WhatsApp has more than two billion users worldwide.

Also in our country it does not seem to concern all users. For example, there are 3.1 million Belgian numbers in the database, while WhatsApp is estimated to be on more than 5 million mobile phones in Belgium. It seems that the data dump contains only phone numbers and no further data, such as names or other metadata.

Cybernews believes the data may have been collected through scraping, where someone can extract information from profiles or sites. It is not clear whether this is an old or a new leak. The hacker announced the existence of the database on a forum, while contact with him or her is via Telegram.

It is unknown whether there are already buyers of the database. For the American numbers, for example, the provider asks 7,000 dollars (more than 6,700 euros).

According to RTL Info, WhatsApp users in 84 countries have been affected. Most of the data (45 million numbers) comes from Egypt, followed by Italy with 35 million data. Cyber ​​experts warn that the number of phishing attempts via WhatsApp may now increase. Because anyone who buys such a dataset can more easily pretend to be someone they know and try to extort money.

Meta, the parent company of WhatsApp, has not yet communicated about the leaked data.

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