Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

WhatsApp data leak: 500M user records for sale

cybernews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 109 posts

Re: WhatsApp data leak: 500M user records for sale

#2

Post by andrewallbright »

So... what advise is there for technology comfortable people who want to mitigate the effects of data leaks like these? It seems like data provided is will be exposed eventually and company size doesn't seem correlate with data safety.

For example should people be advised to rotate phone numbers every N amount of time?

Re: WhatsApp data leak: 500M user records for sale

#3

Post by Komodai »

andrewallbright wrote: post #2

So... what advise is there for technology comfortable people who want to mitigate the effects of data leaks like these? It seems like data provided is will be exposed eventually and company size doesn't seem correlate with data safety. For example should people be advised to rotate phone numbers every N amount of time?

No post body was provided.

Re: WhatsApp data leak: 500M user records for sale

#4

Post by [deleted] »

andrewallbright wrote: post #2

So... what advise is there for technology comfortable people who want to mitigate the effects of data leaks like these? It seems like data provided is will be exposed eventually and company size doesn't seem correlate with data safety. For example should people be advised to rotate phone numbers every N amount of time?

[deleted]

Re: WhatsApp data leak: 500M user records for sale

#7

Post by TrianguloY »

Are there any other data associated with the number, other than the country and whether it has a WhatsApp account?

You can check if a given number is on WhatsApp easily, and associate the country based on the phone format itself. Make this for all possible phone numbers (big number, but not impossibly big) and you will have a "leak".

Edit: having a list of WhatsApp users already generated for you is easier than checking yourself, so this is more of a "commodity database" rather than a leak.

I guess this would be the same as testing randomly millions of email addresses for whether they bounce back or not, and sell this knowledge database.

Re: WhatsApp data leak: 500M user records for sale

#9

Post by kadoban »

andrewallbright wrote: post #2

So... what advise is there for technology comfortable people who want to mitigate the effects of data leaks like these? It seems like data provided is will be exposed eventually and company size doesn't seem correlate with data safety. For example should people be advised to rotate phone numbers every N amount of time?

The basic stuff helps a decent amount. Assume your name, phone, email, address are all public. Don't reuse passwords, ever (use a password manager), use 2fa wherever possible, ideally not the SMS kind. Use a password manager that has a tie-in with haveibeenpwned or whatever so you know asap to change your creds.

Some extras: use unique email addresses per site if you can. Some setups allow infinite aliases. Then you can blackhole one that gets leaked, and you can know where it got leaked from.

If you can, have a separate setup (completely separate email account(s), not just aliases, and even separate hardware to access them if you can) for very important accounts, the ones that would ~ruin your life for a good bit if they got taken over (bank, retirement, etc.)

There's also credit monitoring type stuff, which I've never been clear how useful it is, but might be worthwhile. You also may get it free if some company you use has a leak and they try to PR it away that way.

I think there's some way to basically lock your credit against new accounts, I need to look into that someday, don't know the details or if it even exists.

Re: WhatsApp data leak: 500M user records for sale

#10

Post by Gualdrapo »

TrianguloY wrote: post #7

Are there any other data associated with the number, other than the country and whether it has a WhatsApp account? You can check if a given number is on WhatsApp easily, and associate the country based on the phone format itself. Make this for all possible phone numbers (big number, but not impossibly big) and you will have a "leak". Edit: having a list of WhatsApp users already generated for you is easier than check…

Profile pictures come to mind.
Post reply on HN