WhatsApp data breach threats 500 million users worldwide

The days are not going easy at Meta offices. After the partial failure of Metaverse as the company’s core business, the company lost billions and laid off several of its employees. Now, Mark Zuckerberg as Meta’s CEO is betting on WhatsApp and Messenger as the source of success for the forthcoming years. The problem is that WhatsApp is getting the spotlight today thanks to a massive data breach that puts several of the app users at risk.

More than 500 million WhatsApp numbers had their numbers sold

According to reports, a hacker has openly sold the phone numbers of about 487 million WhatsApp users from 84 countries and regions on a certain forum. Of the 487 million mobile phone numbers, more than 32 million were from the US. About 45 million were from Egypt, 5 million from Italy, and 29 Million from Saudi Arabia. It also sold 20 million from France and Turkey, 10 million from Russian users, and over 11 million from British users. Brazil which also is one of the key markets had 8 million of its users exposed.

There is a bit of irony in this data breach. Not long ago, Mark Zuckerberg stated that WhatsApp is more private and secure than iMessage. In less than one month, the green messenger is in the middle of a huge data breach. The app users end-to-end data encryption on Android and iOS. iMessage meanwhile uses “insecure” SMS when sending messages to Android devices.

Despite this, the app’s end-to-end encryption failed. As a result, several users across the world had their phone numbers exposed. We’re waiting to see whether WhatsApp will acknowledge the facts and give more details. For now, the company has chosen silence.

According to reports, the app currently has more than 2 billion users across the world. It’s one of the largest message apps in the world. That means that the leaked data contains the phone numbers of nearly a quarter of the users in the world.