Truecaller is a caller Id and spam blocker application with over with over 130million active users daily and 250 million users worldwide.
If you are a Truecaller user,you might have a cause to worry.It has been reported that personal data of millions Truecaller users have been leaked an available on the darkweb.
The report reveals that Indians account for 60-70 percent of Truecaller’s entire userbase (140 million) and their data is being sold for about €2,000, which converts to more than 800,000 Nigerian Naira. On the other hand, the data of global users are priced as high as €25,000, which is about 10,064,507 Nigerian Naira
However, a Truecaller spokesman has denied all reports of the data breach saying that there was no attack on their database and reassuring Truecaller users that all their data is safe and there is no record of sensitive user information including the financial data was extracted from the database.
According to Truecaller Spokesman,
“It has been recently brought to our attention that some users have been abusing their accounts. In light of this event, we would like to strongly confirm at this stage that there has been no sensitive user information being accessed or extracted, especially our users financial/payment details.
Upon becoming aware of the incident, the team has been investigating the matter and has found a large percentage of the sample data received as evidence does not match or is not Truecaller data. However, we believe some users have been abusing their Truecaller account on our website for a period of time to search for numbers. With limits and other precautionary measures in place, the scale of these users and searches are limited. Since the platform has strict limits to prevent misuse of the application and website, these malicious users have been trying to search for numbers using their own account over a wide period of time to avoid getting blocked or flagged by our systems.
We would like to reinforce that this was not an attack on our database, as data stored on our servers is highly secured. We take the privacy of our users and the integrity of our services, extremely seriously. As we investigate, we will continuously implement new protocols to prevent any future attempts.”
However, cyberexperts believs that such a large chunk of data could only be accessed by breaching the database of Truecaller.