Apparently, an attacker was able to gain access to all telephone numbers that were registered with the Clubhouse app — the application that has grown the most in recent months due to its popularity in creating online audio chat rooms.
The huge database of phone numbers has appeared for sale on a so-called darknet internet forum. Security researcher Marc Ruef reports on Twitter that the data set comprises a total of 3.8 billion telephone numbers.
Although the application only has a few tens of millions of users, the hacker ensures that the platform synchronizes the contact list of its customers and automatically adds the numbers to the “secret base” of the Clubhouse.
Clubhouse itself commented on the case. No data leak was noticed at the company. “There was no data leak at Clubhouse. There are a series of bots generating billions of random phone numbers. In the event that one of these random numbers happens to exist on our platform due to mathematical coincidence, Clubhouse’s API returns no user identifiable information.”
It is not the first time that the Clubhouse databases are compromised. Just over 3 months ago, at the beginning of April, it was made public that the company had a data breach problem affecting more than a million user accounts.