WhatsApp data breach sees nearly 500 million user records up for sale
WhatsApp data breach sees nearly 500 million user records up for sale
If you use WhatsApp, your details could well be up for sale
Nice. Ditch WhatsApp. Use an app that has no user identifiers to begin with so no chance of that happening, that is apps like https://simplex.chat/
You end up with a catch22 problem of network effect. If Signal failed to move users with Felon Yuck's tweet, nothing will move users off of WhatsApp, and you basically need it for social participation, if you live outside USA/Japan/Korea/China.
More than 32 million of the leaked records are said to be from users in the US, with 11 million from UK users. Other affected nations include Egypt (45 million), Italy (35 million), Saudi Arabia (29 million), France (20 million), Turkey (20 million), and Russia (10 million).
It seems that individual countries’ data is up for grabs, with the US dataset up for $7,000, and British numbers up for a similar per-capita figure of $2,500.
Most alarmingly, it doesn’t seem to be an empty promise designed to threaten the Meta-owned company, with almost 2,000 numbers shared with Cybernews in a sample request verified to be WhatsApp users.