A hacker has hacked the WhatsApp accounts of nearly 500 million users around the world. Morocco is concerned by almost 19 million numbers.
The hacker managed to crack the phone numbers and WhatsApp accounts of 478 million users around the world.
These phone numbers relate to 84 countries, announced the hackers on the darkweb, exposing his exploit. These databases are very recent, from 2022 he claims, and ensures that the numbers are active.
It is not possible at this time to know who was targeted by this attack, but if the hacker succeeds in selling the data to third parties, users may be victims of phishing attacks or receive spam advertisements .
Disclosed phone numbers could be subject to other more serious repercussions, such as phishing, identity theft or fraud.
According to the Cyber News media, the hacked numbers with the first and last names of their holders are currently for sale on a dark web forum and the hacker would have managed to steal these numbers via “scraping”, by collecting publicly accessible data, on the web, through automated software, such as when users complete online forms.
In France, 20 million numbers are concerned. To prove that he was indeed in possession of data linked to several WhatsApp users, the hacker shared a sample of data with cybersecurity researchers. The criminal assures that “all numbers are linked to active users”
Morocco is the 7th country out of the 84 victims of hacking in terms of number of numbers hacked. The country with the most hacked accounts is Egypt with nearly 45 million users, followed by Italy with more than 35 million, and the United States in third place with a total of 32 million numbers.
The next countries in the top ranking are respectively Saudi Arabia, France and Turkey.
WhatsApp is said to have more than two billion monthly active users worldwide, but has not commented on the matter. This is not the first time that the social network has been hacked in the same style.
The hacked WhatsApp database vendor proved these numbers to be real and active users by sharing sample data with researchers from the specialist site Cybernews.
The sample leaked by the hacker contained 1097 user numbers in the UK and 817 in the US in the shared sample, and all of them turned out to be real numbers of real people, using WhatsApp.