A spokesperson of instant messaging and voice-over-IP service WhatsApp on Monday said there is no evidence of a ‘data leak’ from WhatsApp. Evidently, Mashable India, a digital media platform, has reported that according to a recent allegation from Cybernews, someone managed to hack into WhatsApp and acquired the personal information of almost 500 million users, which is now purportedly for sale.
“The claim written on Cybernews is based on unsubstantiated screenshots. There is no evidence of a ‘data leak’ from WhatsApp,” the WhatsApp spokesperson said. The spokesperson has also said the purported list is a set of phone numbers — and not “WhatsApp user information”. In this development, Cybernews Chief Editor Jurgita Lapienyte had also tweeted, “There’s no evidence WhatsApp has been hacked. The leak might be a scrape but that doesn’t mean it’s any less dangerous for the affected users.”
Mashable India had reported that an actor allegedly advertised the sale of over 487 million WhatsApp users’ personal information, including their cell numbers on a hacker site.
The listing states that the user data comprises 32 million US users and comes from 84 other nations including Egypt, Italy, Saudi Arabia, France, and Turkey.
The stolen phone numbers can be used for impersonation, phishing, and other fraudulent operations. Whatsapp’s parent company Meta has not yet replied to this update.
As per Mashable India, the WhatsApp user database from the US is being sold for $7,000 which is much higher when compared to rates of user data from the UK and Germany which costs $2,500 and $2,000, respectively. Reportedly, it’s intriguing that no user profiles from India are on the list. (ANI)
