WhatsApp denies data breach concerns, says no evidence of any leak

New Delhi, Nov 28: WhatsApp has denied the reports of an alleged data breach on the platform.

"The claim written on Cybernews is based on unsubstantiated screenshots. There is no evidence of a 'data leak' from WhatsApp," said a WhatsApp spokesperson on Monday.

Additionally, the reporter of the Cybernews article has also tweeted that there's no evidence of a data hack/ leak on WhatsApp.

"There's no evidence WhatsApp has been hacked. The leak might be a scrape but that doesn't mean it's any less dangerous for the affected users," she tweeted.

In a shocking incident, phone numbers of nearly 500 million WhatsApp users have been leaked and have been put up for sale on a popular hacking forum. What's shocking is that the leaked database is up for sale for as much as $7,000 (approx. Rs 5,72,000).

As per a report by Cybernews, a hacker has posted the data of over 500 million records on sale. If someone is interested to buy the data in a specific country, then the price will be relatively lesser. For instance, to buy the data of the UK, one has to shell out $2,500 (approx. ₹2,04,000) instead of $7,000 as mentioned above. This way, the person will be able to access the private information of WhatsApp users in the UK.

As per the source, when they contacted the seller, he shared 1,097 numbers from the UK as evidence. Upon investigation, the numbers were legit as they were used to register WhatsApp accounts. However, the hacker did not specify how he obtained the data. The report has also shared an image depicting the list of countries affected by this breach and the number of accounts that were exposed. In India, it is said that over 6 million WhatsApp users have been affected by the data breach.