Top News

messaging app WhatsApp Once again there is a serious privacy controversy. Researchers at the University of Vienna recently revealed that thanks to a simple security flaw, they were able to extract more than 3.5 billion phone numbers from WhatsApp – meaning the mobile number of almost every user around the world could be obtained in just a few clicks.

According to reports, the most worrying thing is that this weakness was informed to Meta (parent company of WhatsApp) since 2017, but no strong security steps were taken for the entire eight years.

How did such huge data get exposed?

A special feature of WhatsApp is that whenever a new number is saved in your phone, the app immediately tells whether that person is on WhatsApp or not. Additionally, in many cases his profile photo, name, and status are also visible. This feature turned into a big threat. Researchers said that if you continuously check different numbers, then information about every user on WhatsApp can be obtained and Meta did not put any limit on this process.

Austrian cyber security experts also did the same. They started entering every possible phone number into the system, and WhatsApp started identifying who a user was, one by one. Just in this way, the list of 3.5 billion WhatsApp accounts in the world was prepared.

30 million numbers in 30 minutes!

Only 30 million (3 crore) phone numbers of America were obtained by researchers in just 30 minutes. After this this process continued continuously and the data kept increasing. According to Aljosha Judmayer, a researcher at the University of Vienna, “This is the largest phone number exposure to our knowledge. A database of this size has never been leaked before.”

If this exploit had fallen into the hands of cyber criminals, the consequences would have been:

• Phone numbers of billions of people in the world exposed
• Countless dangers of phishing, fraud and fraud
• Possibility of identity theft
• Massive Spam and Scam Attacks

Researchers also acknowledged that this would have been “the world’s largest data leakage”.

It was told in 2017, but Meta’s sleep will open in 2025.

The most serious aspect is that in 2017 a researcher had reported this security weakness to Meta. But despite this the company did not implement any strong security measures. Surprisingly, the same flaw remains the same in 2025.

The University of Vienna team, showing responsibility, deleted the entire database and immediately sent an alert to Meta. It took Meta another six months to implement the “rate limiting” feature in WhatsApp. This is the same simple solution which if implemented could have kept 3.5 billion numbers safe.

Meta cleanup

WhatsApp says that the company was already working on security upgrades and they found no evidence that any hacker had misused this flaw. However, security experts believe this claim is almost impossible to prove – as stolen data is often sold on the dark web without any trace.