19 million Italian phone numbers registered on WhatsApp they are for sale on a forum dedicated to the world of hacking. This is according to an article by Red Hot Cyber.
The loot with the phone numbers of the Italians is for sale at Infringement Forumsa portal that has taken over from RaidForums, a historic site used by criminals to buy and sell stolen data, credit card codes, exploits and malware – recently seized by Europol.
The archive contains the phone number and name of the holder. Red Hot Cyber, a cybersecurity information site, contacted the criminals and managed to get a example of the archive and thus obtain the telephone numbers of approximately 5,000 people. There seem to be no major doubts: the archive is real and contains the personal data of more than 19 million people.
The archive was last updated in January 2022.
The same criminal behind the archive dedicated to Italians sells several other archives pertaining to just as many other countries. All in all, the criminals are in possession of more than 100 million phone numbers We don’t know how they came into possession of the material. Given the number of users affected by the data breach, it is likely that the archive also contains the private numbers of various celebrities, as well as personalities from the worlds of politics, journalism and scientific research.
While a phone number alone is not enough to launch a malicious attack, having information about so many WhatsApp users makes it possible to organize phishing campaigns on a very large scale.
Source: Lega Nerd
