There do not appear to be any Indian user records in the WhatsApp data leak involving over 500 million user records...
Digital Desk: WhatsApp is widely viewed as a secure cross-platform instant messaging service that works on nearly any device, thanks to features such as end-to-end encryption.
According to a fresh claim from Cybernews, someone managed to breach WhatsApp and steal the personal data of over 500 million users, which is supposedly for sale.
According to the study, an actor advertised in a hacker community forum that he was selling the data of over 487 million WhatsApp users, including their phone numbers. The listing further states that the data consists of users from 84 different nations, including 32 million users from the United States.
The hacked data also includes user information from Egypt, Italy, Saudi Arabia, France, and Turkey. It's also worth noting that the list contains no user data from India. The US database on WhatsApp users costs $7,000, while the databases in the UK and Germany cost $2,500 and $2,000, respectively.
When cybernews requested a sample, the hacker sent a limited batch of data containing user data from 1097 phone numbers in the United States and 817 phone numbers in the United Kingdom. These hacked phone numbers could be used for phishing and other fraudulent operations, as well as impersonation.
Meta has not yet answered this update. It is now assumed that the WhatsApp data of around 500 million people was collected by online scraping or web harvesting, which involves the use of an automated data tool to collect data from a specific service, which violates WhatsApp's terms of service.
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