The infallible trick to find out if your phone number is for sale on the Internet

Massive leaks after security breaches are not exceptional, unfortunately. Only throughout this 2022 there have been multiple cases on social networks, messaging platforms and much more. As with emails, this sensitive information can be sold on the dark web or hacking forums and later used for other illegal purposes.

Sometimes, those responsible for the leak will admit it and tell their users that they have suffered a leak and what risks they are running. In other cases, you will have to search manually if the data of your telephone number has been stolen or not.

find out if your phone number is for sale on the Internet

Mass leaks of phone numbers

Last November, an unknown cybercriminal announced that he was selling a database of almost 500 million mobile phone numbers belonging to WhatsApp users. The announcement of this sale was found on a well-known hacker community forum and claimed to have new data, not older than 2022, of millions of people around the world, including Spain, with apparently almost 11 million phone numbers. leaked.

Teléfono filtrado

Leaked phone numbers could be used for marketing, phishing, phishing, and fraud purposes . Occasionally, large volumes of personal data are found being used for the purpose of sending targeted spam. This often includes many of the same attributes frequently found in data breaches, such as names, addresses, phone numbers, and dates of birth.

“In this age, we all leave a sizable digital footprint, and tech giants like Meta should take every precaution and means to safeguard that data. We should ask ourselves if an additional clause of ‘abuse of the platform is not allowed in the Terms and Conditions’ is enough. Threat actors don’t care about those terms, so companies need to take rigorous measures to mitigate threats and prevent platform abuse from a technical standpoint,” explains Cybernews research team head Mantas. Sasnauskas.

How to know if your number is for sale

In cases like the one mentioned above, although there has previously been more than one security breach in which the access data of registered users have ended up being exposed, you may not know if you have been one of the most affected. Beyond that the exposed company can communicate it to you in some way.

However, there are forms on the Internet where you can consult if you appear in any of these leaks. For example, the website Have I Been Pwned ( https://haveibeenpwned.com ) where you can check if your email or password are public. That is, if they are part of any of the security leaks that have occurred and therefore you should change the password or not use it.

Have I Been Pwned

In addition, over time, it also ended up adding the option to verify whether or not your phone number is safe in terms of having appeared in massive leaks. To do this, you only have to enter the telephone number with its international prefix (remember that in Spain it is +34) and it will return the result.