Meta’s instant messaging application WhatsApp has active users from all over the world. However, the high number of users also brings security problems. It has been revealed that WhatsApp, which has come to the fore with security problems many times in the past, has now stolen the data of 500 million users.
Phone numbers of 487 million WhatsApp users stolen!
The data of 487 million WhatsApp users was put up for sale in an ad on a hacker forum. According to the information given in the announcement, only the phone numbers of the users are included in the stolen database.
The source of the news, Cybernews, requested sample data from hackers for evidence. When checking the correctness of the phone numbers registered to 1097 US and 817 UK sent for testing, it was confirmed that all of them were WhatsApp users.
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Egypt, Italy and the USA are among the countries affected by the stolen data. It is stated that 19 million WhatsApp users from Turkey are in the database. Here are all countries and the number of users affected;
| Country | Number of users |
| Sweetcorn | 44 million 823 thousand |
| Italy | 35 million 677 thousand |
| United States of America | 32 million 315 thousand |
| Saudi Arabia | 28 million 804 thousand |
| France | 19 million 848 thousand |
| Turkey | 19 million 638 thousand |
| Morocco | 18 million 939 thousand |
| Colombia | 17 million 957 thousand |
| Iraq | 17 million 116 thousand |
| Africa | 14 million 323 thousand |
| Mexican | 13 million 330 thousand |
| Malaysia | 11 million 675 thousand |
| United Kingdom | 11 million 522 thousand |
| Spain | 10 million 894 thousand |
| Russia | 9 million 996 thousand |
| Brazil | 8 million 64 thousand |
| Australia | 7 million 320 thousand |
| India | 6 million 162 thousand |
| Germany | 6 million 54 thousand |
| Finland | 1 million 381 thousand |
| Austria | 1 million 249 thousand |
| Chinese | 670 thousand |
| Greece | 617 thousand |
| Japan | 428 thousand |
| Cyprus | 152 thousand |
Meta has not yet made any statement on the subject. If the allegedly stolen data is real, it is possible to say that a quarter of users registered with the application are affected. Because WhatsApp has more than 2 billion users, and hackers state that only active users are in the database.
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