This WhatsApp Security Flaw Exposed 3.5 Billion Phone Numbers, Here's How Meta Responded

WhatsApp brings to us some of the best features to make the platform interactive for users. Apart from that, the instant messaging platforms also have tight protocols when it comes to user data. However,

recent research has found that a security flaw on WhatsApp exposed the contact numbers of almost 3.5 billion people. Security researchers at the University of Vienna found a simple exploit that was able to extract 3.5 billion phones numbers from the platform, as reported by Wired. According to the researchers, if the bad actors use this flaw, then the same could become the 'largest data leak in history.' Wired Said, 'WhatsApp’s mass adoption stems in part from how easy it is to find a new contact on the messaging platform: Add someone’s phone number, and WhatsApp instantly shows whether they’re on the service, and often their profile picture and name, too.' The report by Wired further added, 'Repeat that same trick a few billion times with every possible phone number, it turns out, and the same feature can also serve as a convenient way to obtain the cell number of virtually every WhatsApp user on earth—along with, in many cases, profile photos and text that identifies each of those users.'The researchers only took half an hour to capture the first 30 million US phone numbers, which is something pretty concerning. The researchers deleted the database of phone numbers and alerted Meta to the same.

What Meta Had To Say On The Matter?

In a response to 9To5Mac, one of the Meta representatives said, 'We are grateful to the University of Vienna researchers for their responsible partnership and diligence under our Bug Bounty program. This collaboration successfully identified a novel enumeration technique that surpassed our intended limits, allowing the researchers to scrape basic publicly available information.Also Read: WhatsApp Usernames Coming By 2026: Here’s What You Need To Know We had already been working on industry-leading anti-scraping systems, and this study was instrumental in stress-testing and confirming the immediate efficacy of these new defenses. Importantly, the researchers have securely deleted the data collected as part of the study, and we have found no evidence of malicious actors abusing this vector. As a reminder, user messages remained private and secure thanks to WhatsApp’s default end-to-end encryption, and no non-public data was accessible to the researchers.'