Mobile numbers of 487 million WhatsApp users worldwide have been stolen and sold to a ‘known’ hacker forum. Among these numbers, there are the numbers of 3.8 million WhatsApp users in Bangladesh. Research based online publication Cyber News reported this information. The database contained 487 million phone numbers.
It is assumed that these data are from the year 2022. And the database from which they have been stolen, there are data-data of WhatsApp users from 85 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, India, Italy, Egypt. According to the hacker team involved in the theft, these WhatsApp numbers belong to ‘active’ users.
The database has stolen the information of about a quarter of WhatsApp users worldwide, The Financial Express reports, adding that the hacker also shared a poster for sale. According to a report by Indian media TV9 Bangla, hackers have advertised a database containing the phone numbers of nearly 50 million WhatsApp users for sale to a hacking community.
According to the report, WhatsApp’s database that was stolen has the numbers of 32 million users in the US and 11.5 million in the UK. However, the users in Egypt have been the most affected by this data theft incident. About 4.5 million users of this country are at risk.
Apart from this, the hackers are claiming that they have stolen the numbers of 35 million Italian, 10 million Russian and 6 million Indian WhatsApp users.
BitDefender’s report states that WhatsApp user data from around 85 countries has been posted for sale: including Bangladesh (3.8 million users), the United States (32 million users), Britain (10 million users), Russia (10 million users), Italy (3.5 million users), Saudi Arabia (2.9 million users) and India (6 million users).