The phone numbers of nearly 500 million Whatsapp users are currently for sale on the internet. The leak concerns 84 countries, including Belgium. What can these numbers be used for? What are the dangers for users?
The data of nearly 500,000 million Whatsapp users have been resold: in Belgium more than 5 million people use this messaging system on their smartphone. With us, piracy concerns 3,188,584 numbers. For the moment, it is impossible to know how this data leaked but it is currently on sale.
Olivier Bogaert, cybersecurity expert, provides his analysis for RTL INFO. “I think that with the context that has been described to us here, with this large number of telephone numbers, it is an attempted scam”he believes. “It’s playing on the identity theft of our contacts: I have a friend on Whatsapp, I receive a message from him, it’s his number since he is in my contact list, so no worries , I follow up”illustrates Olivier Bogaert. “Obviously the idea here is to be able to make money.”
Parameters to adjust
But how to avoid this kind of hacking and protect my number? “In Whatsapp settings, there is a privacy setting to limit the visibility of certain content”continues our expert who advises not to call our close contacts and to name our own profile only with a first name. “The contacts we have are people we know, so just having the first name is enough.”
Nearly a quarter of application users are affected. For the moment, the parent company has not communicated on this leak.