"The change also comes after a team of Austrian researchers uncovered a potential flaw in WhatsApp's security, which could enable spammers and scammers to gather large databases of phone numbers based on this feature."
"The research team used a range of random phone number combinations in the app to extract over 3.5 billion users' phone numbers from the platform."
Austrian researchers discovered a security flaw in WhatsApp that allowed enumeration of phone numbers through a contact-matching feature. The flaw permitted automated probing of random phone-number combinations to identify which numbers were registered on the platform. Using that technique, the team extracted more than 3.5 billion WhatsApp users' phone numbers. Harvesting such vast databases enables spammers, phishers, and scammers to perform large-scale targeted campaigns, increasing risk to user privacy and security. WhatsApp implemented a change to mitigate the risk and make bulk enumeration of phone numbers significantly more difficult.
Read at Social Media Today
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