More than 3 million Belgian phone numbers have been put up for sale on the dark web by a hacker who claims to have got his hands on nearly 500 million phone numbers of users of the service.
In total, no less than 3,183,584 Belgians are affected by this gigantic data leak. The WhatsApp accounts in question were not hacked in the strict sense of the term. The data would have been scraped through various hacks from other platforms and cross-referenced so that the list only includes the numbers of the platform’s users.
And, bad news, there’s no way to tell if your number is affected. On the other hand, we know that approximately 25% of accounts are concerned at the global level. In Belgium, the proportion might be higher. It might affect up to 50% of users of the platform, if we refer to statistics from other countries concerned in Europe. So there is a good chance that your account will be part of the lot.
Several certainties: the 487 million accounts affected by this “hack” are all active. The Cybernews site checked a sample of nearly 2,000 numbers transmitted by the hacker for verification. And de facto, these were real phone numbers. Another guarantee: the stolen numbers are for sale on the dark web. However, there is no need to worry too much: your WhatsApp account is not in danger. On the other hand, it is possible that all this leads to sending many spam messages.
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