WhatsApp, the phone numbers of 35 million Italians for sale

Mobile numbers almost updated 500 million WhatsApp users for sale and unfortunately 35 million are Italians. As reported by Cybernewson November 16, an attacker posted a sale announcement on a well-known hacker community forum claiming to have an updated database with 487 million mobile numbers of WhatsApp users.

Inside it the data from 84 countries, of which 32 million numbers would be of US users. Not only that, an important share of telephone numbers would belong to the citizens of Egypt (45 million), Italy (35 million)Saudi Arabia (29 million), France (20 million), Turkey (20 million), Russia (10 million) and the United Kingdom (11 million). US subscriber number package would cost $7,000that of German users 2000 dollars and so on.

Phone numbers could be employed by other attackers to attacks called smishing and vishingi.e. through calls and SMS in which companies or other organizations are simulated to induce the victim to hand over sensitive data both verbally and by referring to fraudulent web pages via links.

When questioned by Cybernews, which was able to analyze a sample of the data and confirm its authenticity, the seller did not specify how he obtained the database. L’hypothesis more popular is that the database was obtained via scrapinga technique that allows you to extract data from a website.

“Once this data falls into unreliable hands, scammers could organize all kinds of attacks, from spam calls to voice phishing. Another big problem is privacy risks. In fact, most online services require the entering the phone number together with other personal data: name, e-mail address and sometimes credit card information Doxing, cyberbullying, blackmail and extortion are among the potential cyberthreats victims may face,” said Victor Chebyshev , Lead Security Researcher in Kaspersky’s Global Research & Analysis Team.

For protect yourself from these Kaspersky attacks suggests:

• Configure data protection in WhatsApp settings so that only contacts in your list can view them.
• Be careful when receiving calls and messages from unknown numbers.
• Turn on two-factor authentication, if it’s not already turned on, so cybercriminals can’t use your number for malicious purposes.
• Do not open suspicious links in messages, as they may attach malicious files or redirect to fraudulent resources.