New Delhi, 20 November (Daily Kiran): A major security flaw in WhatsApp has led to the leakage of phone numbers of nearly all users globally. Security researchers revealed that they were able to access around 3.5 billion phone numbers using a simple trick. Shockingly, Meta had been alerted about this issue back in 2017.
According to a group of researchers from Austria, they used the contact discovery feature in WhatsApp to check every possible number. Through this method, they accessed the phone numbers of 3.5 billion users on the messaging platform. They also found that profile photos of about 57% of these users and the text written on the profiles of around 29% users could be viewed.
Researchers said they were able to check nearly 100 million numbers per hour. Despite being informed about this flaw in 2017, Meta did not limit the speed or number of contact search requests made through WhatsApp Web. As a result, researchers could easily continue checking large volumes of phone numbers.
This vulnerability allowed researchers to build a huge global database of 3.5 billion active WhatsApp accounts. They warned that if this flaw had been misused, it could have resulted in the “biggest data leak in history.” They explained that WhatsApp’s contact search feature, which is used to sync phone contacts and make searching easier, unknowingly opened the door to large-scale data leakage.
Meta has acknowledged this flaw. In a statement to Wired, WhatsApp’s Vice President of Engineering Nitin Gupta said the study was helpful in confirming the strength of new anti-scraping protections. He also said there was no evidence of malicious actors misusing this method. He clarified that, due to WhatsApp’s default end-to-end encryption, private messages remained secure and no non-public data was accessible. As per the report, Meta took around six months to fix the issue and apply rate limits to prevent such data scraping.
My name is Bhupendra Singh Chundawat. I am an experienced content writer with several years of expertise in the field. Currently, I contribute to Daily Kiran, creating engaging and informative content across a variety of categories including technology, health, travel, education, and automobiles. My goal is to deliver accurate, insightful, and captivating information through my words to help readers stay informed and empowered.
