At the Meta offices, days are not always easy. The company lost billions of dollars and let go a number of its employees after Metaverse, which was the company’s main business, only succeeded in part. In his capacity as CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg is currently placing his bets on WhatsApp and Messenger as the company’s growth engines going forward. The issue is that WhatsApp is receiving attention right now due to a significant data leak that puts a number of the app’s users in danger.
WHATSAPP NUMBERS FOR MORE THAN 500 MILLION PEOPLE HAD THEIR NUMBERS SOLD
The contact details of about 487 million WhatsApp users across 84 different countries and regions have reportedly been publicly sold by a hacker on a particular site. Of the 487 million mobile phone numbers, the US accounted for more over 32 million. 29 million people were from Saudi Arabia, 45 million were from Egypt, and 5 million were from Italy. Additionally, 20 million units each from France and Turkey, 10 million from Russian users, and more than 11 million from British users were sold. There were 8 million consumers exposed in Brazil, one of the major marketplaces.
This data breach has a certain amount of irony. Mark Zuckerberg has said that compared to iMessage, WhatsApp is more private and secure. A significant data breach involving the green messenger will be underway in less than a month. End-to-end data encryption is used by the app for iOS and Android. In contrast, while delivering messages to Android smartphones, iMessage employs “insecure” SMS.
The app’s end-to-end encryption nonetheless failed. As a result, the phone numbers of numerous people from various countries were made public. We’re anticipating if WhatsApp will accept the facts and provide additional information. The business has decided to keep quiet for the time being.
There are presently more than 2 billion users of the app worldwide. Therefore, over one-fourth of all users worldwide are represented by their phone numbers in the released data.
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