• Online data breaches have exposed the information of 6 million WhatsApp users in India.
• Up to 80 countries have apparently been impacted by the breach.
• Hackers can use the exposed information for spamming, phishing, and other purposes.

WhatsApp, which boasts a user base of over two billion people, appears to be facing data and privacy issues once more. According to a Cybernews article, an unknown vendor posted the personal information of about 500 million WhatsApp users for sale on a hacker forum.

The social media corporation has not yet commented on this, but according to the article, it looked into many data samples and discovered that the leak was real. Up to 80 countries were apparently affected by the leak, including Brazil, Spain, Egypt, Italy, Brazil, and more. India is also included on the list. 

The referenced source released a graph on its Twitter account that demonstrates how more than 6 million people's personal information had been exposed online. According to the report, the threat actor is asking $7,000, £2,500, and $2,000 for the US dataset, UK dataset, and German dataset, respectively. It hid the cost in other countries, including India. How the hacker amassed the phone numbers of millions of active WhatsApp users is yet unknown.

According to the article, WhatsApp may not be to blame and the hacker may have used a technique called 'scraping' to do the crime. Instead of a hack, several websites were used to collect the data in this situation. There is a possibility that the phone numbers were obtained from websites.

 Hackers may use the exposed information for spamming, phishing scams, identity theft, and other online crimes. According to the given source, consumers can try to avoid scamming attempts by ignoring them even if they won't be able to determine if their number is in the database.