Meta’s owned WhatsApp is one of the biggest messaging platforms, with 2 billion monthly active users globally. Around 500 million active WhatsApp accounts and up-to-date contact numbers surface online for everyone to access. Over 533 million WhatsApp phone numbers were compromised, a quarter of the total WhatsApp users. You can find these numbers for free on a hacking community forum, and they belong to 84 different countries.
“In this age, we all leave a sizeable digital footprint – and tech giants like Meta should take all precautions and means to safeguard that data,” said the Head of the Cybernews research team, Mantas Sasnauskas. “We should ask whether an added clause of ‘scraping or platform abuse is not permitted in the Terms and Conditions’ is enough. Threat actors don’t care about those terms, so companies should take rigorous steps to mitigate threats and prevent platform abuse from a technical standpoint.”
These phone numbers could be used for impersonation, phishing attempts, fraud, and marketing purposes or could be much worse than this. Hackers didn’t disclose the hacking method or the source of the database. However, Cybernews indicates hackers might gather the data through Web Scraping, which is an automated script to confirm web pages that the number is being used for WhatsApp.
You should also configure your Last Seen and Online profile photo and About to Contacts in WhatsApp settings only to protect yourself from prying eyes. You need to confirm whether your number is on the list. What measures have you taken to protect your digital footprint?