Urgent Warning To WhatsApp Users A Serious Security Vulnerability Threatens Billions Of Accounts

It turned out that this vulnerability allowed researchers to access about 3.5 billion accounts on the messaging application owned by Meta, without penetrating the content of encrypted messages. However, they were able to collect massive amounts of metadata, including phone numbers, geographic locations, device type, and age of accounts.

Experts from the University of Vienna and the SBA Research Foundation explained that the vulnerability was in the contact discovery mechanism built into WhatsApp, which usually allows the application to search for other users via their phone numbers.

The researchers discovered that there were no limits to the number of contacts that could be searched, enabling them to scan 100 million phone numbers every hour and access billions of user profiles.

“Normally, no system should respond to such a large number of requests in a short time, and this behavior revealed the underlying flaw, allowing us to send virtually unlimited requests and connect user data globally,” said Gabriel Gegenhuber, lead researcher at the University of Vienna.

The researchers collected huge data from WhatsApp accounts in 245 countries. Meta stated that it “addressed the problem and mitigated its severity,” while stressing that the researchers securely deleted the data collected, and no evidence was found of its exploitation by malicious parties.

Nitin Gupta, vice president of engineering at WhatsApp, noted that the platform’s end-to-end encryption was not compromised, and that the study helped test the effectiveness of systems to combat illegal data collection.

However, the researchers warned that the study shows the dangers of “centralizing” global messages to a few applications, noting that metadata alone could reveal sensitive information about users, such as the operating system, the number of connected devices, and even precise locations in some countries.

The study showed that millions of active accounts are located in countries that officially ban WhatsApp, such as China and Myanmar.

Source: Daily Mail