New Delhi: A new security vulnerability that has been uncovered within WhatsApp has leaked the phone numbers of almost all users of the social network platform, an estimated 3.5 billion users, even though Meta was notified of the problem as early as 2017. The study conducted by the University of Vienna found that WhatsApp had an option of contact discovery and enabled an endless number of checks on phone numbers, which means it was possible to scrape user data at a scale unmatched before. The team managed to get hold of 30 million U.S. numbers in just 30 minutes and later on billions of other numbers worldwide, reported by Wired.

Meta claims that it has since added new rate limits security; however, critics point out that the solution took years to be announced. The company claims that n

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