WhatsApp Denies Data Leakage Of 500 Mn Users

Meta-owned messaging service WhatsApp has denied reports of leaking 487 Mn users data for sale in an online hacking community. It has slammed the reports published by US-based media company Cybernews.com claiming that the online messaging app allegedly shared data of 487 Mn users from 80 countries including the US, Spain, Russia and India, among others. 

“The claim written on Cybernews is based on unsubstantiated screenshots. There is no evidence of a data leak from WhatsApp. It has to be noted that the purported list is a set of phone numbers and not ‘WhatsApp user information’,” said WhatsApp spokesperson. 

Besides, Cybersnews’ editor Jurgita Lapienyte also tweeted (on November 26th) that there’s no evidence WhatsApp has been hacked. The leak might be a scrape but that doesn’t mean it’s any less dangerous for the affected users.

The development comes a few days after Cybernews reported that a threat actor was selling WhatsApp user data in a hacking community forum. It stated that the said actor was selling the US dataset for $7K, the UK dataset for $2.5K and Germany dataset for $2K.

The report further informed that such datasets are used by hackers for smishing and other fraudulent activities. 

In another instance, this month, WhatsApp’s India head Abhijit Bose and Meta India’s director of public policy Rajiv Aggarwal stepped down from their roles. Prior to that, Meta India Ajit Mohan too quit while the tech colossal laid off 13% of its staff amounting to 11K employees globally.

In October, WhatsApp faced a partial or total outage after its users globally shared concerns about it ceasing temporarily for an hour on the social media platform Twitter. Besides India, users from Europe and other parts of the world also faced similar issues with WhatsApp. 

Following this, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) asked WhatsApp to submit a report on this matter, explaining the reasons for disruption in the app.

In the month of September, the online messaging app banned over 2.6 Mn accounts. Of this, nearly 1.8 Lakh accounts were banned owing to user complaints while the rest of 8.72 Lakh accounts were taken down for violating community guidelines. 

WhatsApp is one of the most highly used messaging apps in India, having approximately 550 Mn users. At present, Telegram and Signal are some other messaging platforms that are also being used by Indian users; however, these apps stand nowhere when it comes to the popularity and usages of WhatsApp.