"The biggest hack in history"... "Meta" is in trouble

 The “WhatsApp” application, which belongs to the “Meta” company, was subjected to the “largest data breach in history,” as the personal information of nearly 500 million users from 84 countries was leaked, and it is now for sale on a well-known hacking platform, according to what the website revealed. "Cybernews".

According to Cybernews, the data vendors have information on approximately 32 million US users, as well as the data of millions of users from Egypt, Italy, France, the United Kingdom, Russia and India. They are also offering the US data set for $7,000 and the UK data set for $2,500.

“WhatsApp” denies these allegations, stating, through a company spokesperson, that “there is no evidence that data has been leaked from WhatsApp,” stressing that “the allegations published on (Cybernews) are based on baseless screenshots.”

But when Cybernews contacted the seller to verify, they provided him with a list of 1,097 phone numbers in the UK. The media outlet looked at the numbers and verified that they all belong to accounts on WhatsApp. While the hackers did not disclose how they accessed that information.

The Egyptian technical blogger, Mohamed Adel, says, "WhatsApp's denial that the data leak occurred from within the company, and its assertion that there is no technical defect that the company is responsible for, does not deny that the data of about half a billion users has been leaked, especially after Cybernews verified the validity of that data." At a time when the company did not deny its authenticity.

Adel expects, in his interview with "Sky News Arabia", that the hack of "WhatsApp" was "data scraping", which is a "technique" through which websites are targeted, by extracting data from within them. He explains that "the hack is the same as that of Facebook in 2019, after which the Irish Data Protection Commission imposed its latest fines on the application."

The latest breach is not the first of its kind that Mita services are exposed to. A day earlier, the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) imposed a new $276 million fine on Meta, after it failed to prevent the leakage of personal data of about 533 million Facebook users between 2018 and 2019.

And last March, the “DPC” imposed a fine on “Meta” of $ 18.6 million, due to a series of data breaches of about 30 million users on “Facebook” in 2018. It also imposed a fine of $ 402 million on “Meta” last September. , after an investigation proving Instagram's mishandling of teens' data.

In addition to a fine imposed on “Meta” last year, at a value of $ 267 million, as a result of “WhatsApp” violating European data privacy laws. Adel adds: "The hackers obtained user data, including his phone number, as is the case with WhatsApp recently, enabling them to deceive and defraud him, by delivering them a text message with a link, once they enter it, they are asked to provide their payment card, for example." or any other personal information belonging to them, which makes them a victim of fraud.

The technical blogger advises users not to "enter any link that reaches them from an unknown person," expecting that this hack will not be the last to be exposed to "WhatsApp" or any of the "Meta" services. In a fair opinion, “Meta suffers greatly, due to the insistence of its owner and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, on pumping huge investments for his project (Metaverse), without his virtual dreams touching the complex technological reality, which puts pressure on investors, and pushes the company to lay off some of its employees.” , to reduce costs, which greatly affects the quality of services provided by the company to users.