WhatsApp Exposed 3.5 Billion Numbers For 8 Years
A simple security flaw exposed the phone number of nearly every WhatsApp user on earth.
That's 3.5 billion people, including you.
As reported by WIRED, researchers from the University of Vienna found they could just ask WhatsApp if a number existed, and WhatsApp would answer.
There were no limits.
They scraped 100 million numbers an hour.
In just 30 minutes, they grabbed 30 million US phone numbers.
And they didn't just get numbers.
They scraped 2 billion profile photos and 1 billion user bios.
This means anyone could have built a massive searchable database linking your face to your private phone number.
Meta was warned about this exact flaw in 2017.
They ignored it for 8 years.
Source Material:
>Link to article from WIRED
>Link to research paper