WhatsApp faced its biggest data leak ever due to a design flaw in its contact discovery feature, exposing personal information of 3.5 billion users globally. Researchers from the University of Vienna exploited this flaw by feeding billions of generated phone numbers into WhatsApp’s system, collecting data such as phone numbers, profile photos (for 57% of users), and "About" info (for 29%). The flaw existed since at least 2017 but was only recently patched after responsible disclosure. Despite the massive scale, messages remained private due to end-to-end encryption. Meta acknowledged the issue and said it is working on advanced anti-scraping protections. The leak poses risks of spam, phishing, and targeting users in countries where WhatsApp is banned.

#WhatsAppLeak #DataBreach #Meta #PrivacyConcerns #CyberSecurity

 

 

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