Data leak occurred in Meta's WhatsApp, involving the phone numbers of nearly 500 million overseas users.

CTOnews.com, November 25, Cybernews found that a hacker openly sold the phone numbers of about 487 million WhatsApp users from 84 countries and regions on a forum.

Of the 487 million mobile phone numbers, more than 32 million are from the United States, 45 million from Egypt, 5 million from Italy, 29 million from Saudi Arabia, 20 million from France and Turkey, 1000 from Russian subscribers and more than 1100 from the UK.

CTOnews.com has reported that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said publicly last month that WhatsApp is more private and secure than iMessage.

According to Zuckerberg, WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption on Android and iOS, while iMessage uses insecure SMS when sending messages to Android devices.

It is reported that WhatsApp has about 2 billion users overseas, making it one of the largest messaging platforms in the world. This means that the leaked database contains the phone numbers of nearly 1/4 WhatsApp users worldwide.