A Simple WhatsApp Security Flaw Exposed 3.5 Billion Phone Numbers
ID: 236912f2-75ef-5e1b-b6d5-4b2c9a799052
STIX ID: report--236912f2-75ef-5e1b-b6d5-4b2c9a799052
Feed Name: WIRED Security
Threat Score
Researchers at the University of Vienna developed an enumeration method that collected approximately 3.5 billion WhatsApp-registered phone numbers and associated profile metadata, revealing widespread exposure of profile photos and "about" text (e.g., 44% of US numbers showed photos). The report situates this finding alongside prior 2017 research, notes Meta's claims of evolving anti-scraping defenses, and highlights privacy implications such as aggregation with face recognition to build large PII databases.
Your team is not currently subscribed to this feed. You must subscribe to it in order to see this post.