Flaw in WhatsApp’s contact discovery feature exposed billions of phone numbers. Show Quick Read Summary is AI Generated. Newsroom Reviewed

A major security vulnerability in WhatsApp exposed the personal information of nearly 3.5 billion users, according to researchers from the University of Vienna, Austria. The issue stemmed from a weakness in WhatsApp’s contact discovery feature, which the team reported to Meta, owner of the messaging platform.

The US tech giant has since taken steps to address and contain the problem. Researchers were able to use the simple method of checking every possible number in WhatsApp's contact discovery to extract 3.5 billion phone numbers.

By exploiting WhatsApp’s contact discovery mechanism, the researchers were able to send more than 100 million queri

See Full Page