A database of the phone numbers of a quarter of all users of the popular messaging app WhatsApp was recently put up for sale on a hacker community forum. The seller claims that the database is up-to-date and that it contains 487 million phone numbers of active users of the application from 84 countries, including the Czech Republic.
WhatsApp currently has roughly 2 billion users, which means the database reportedly contains the phone numbers of a quarter of them. According to the seller, the phone numbers include, among others, 45 million users from Egypt, 35 million from Italy, 32 million from the USA, 29 million from Saudi Arabia, 20 million from France and the same number from Turkey, 10 million from Russia, 11 million from Great Britain or more than 1,3 million from the Czech Republic.
According to the website cybernews, who reported on the giant leak, the seller did not elaborate on how he "came to" the database. However, it is possible that it got to it using a process known as scraping, which involves collecting data from websites. In other words, WhatsApp wasn't hacked, but the person in question and possibly others could have collected nearly 500 million phone numbers from the website.
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Such a database could be used for spam, phishing attempts and other similar activities. And there's really no way to know if your number is actually in that database. In any case, you can protect yourself from prying eyes that could access your numbers by going to Settings, select an option Privacy and change the settings of Last and online status, Profile photo and Profile informace on "My contacts".
