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44M leaked Pakistani mobile user records apparently belong to Jazz

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A month after hacker peddled 115 million records of Pakistani mobile users, information on 44 million of them have been leaked online.

The data leaked include PII and other information such as mobile and landline numbers, names, addresses, subscriptions and national identification numbers, according to ZDNet, which, after comparing the 44 million records to 55 million of the 115 million leaked earlier, determined they were the same and belonged to Pakistani mobile operator Jazz.

“The database may be valuable for spammers and unethical advertising agencies. If proven to be reliable and authentic, unscrupulous businesses may leverage the data as rocket fuel to promote their products across the nation,” said Ilia Kolochenko, founder and CEO of ImmuniWeb. “While some political parties may well use data to promulgate their electoral campaigns or discredit their rivals in a smart manner.”

Professional cybercriminals might not find the database lucrative “given that many leaked details about the victims can be crawled on Facebook or obtained from previous data breaches,” said Kolochenko. “Nonetheless, cyber mercenaries may aptly exploit the data to identify mobile numbers of journalists and politically exposed persons (PEP) to launch targeted and highly sophisticated attacks on their mobile devices.”

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