The personal information of 414,228 Macau WhatsApp users, has allegedly been leaked and is up for sale on a well-known hacking community forum.
According to a news report by Cybernews – a research-based online publication providing cybersecurity-related news, a dataset that contains mobile phone numbers and other private information of nearly 500 million WhatsApp users from 84 countries, has gone up for sale on BreachForums.
Some 414,228 people in Macau were included in the dataset, together with 293,7841 Hong Kong users, 670,334 people in mainland China, and 734,807 Taiwan residents.
The Office for Personal Data Protection (GPDP) expressed that no inquiries had been received yet on the WhatsApp breach case, while the authorities are closely monitoring the situation, TDM reported.
The anonymous hacker posted an advertisement on the forum on 16 November, claiming that they were selling a WhatsApp user database that included “recent 2022 updates”.
Some 487 million mobile numbers are possibly at risk, accounting for nearly one-fourth of the 2 billion monthly active users WhatsApp has globally.
The threat actor said they planned to sell the dataset they had collected from the United States for $7,000 (MOP56,370), one from the United Kingdom for $2,500, and one from Germany for $2,000, with such information mostly used for malicious purposes such as smishing and vishing.
