Cybernews found that a hacker on a forum openly sold the phone numbers of about 487 million WhatsApp users from 84 countries and regions.
Among the 487 million cell phone numbers, there are more than 32 million numbers from the United States, 45 million from Egypt, 5 million from Italy, 29 million from Saudi Arabia, 20 million from France and Turkey, 10 million phone numbers from Russian users, and more than 11 million from the United Kingdom.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg publicly stated last month that WhatsApp is more private and secure than iMessage.
According to Zuckerberg, WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption on Android and iOS, while iMessage takes the insecure SMS approach when sending messages to Android devices.
WhatsApp is said to have about 2 billion users overseas, making it one of the largest messaging platforms in the world. This means that the leaked database contains the phone numbers of nearly a quarter of the world’s WhatsApp users.
