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WhatsApp Data Leaked: WhatsApp, the most used platform in the world, is not secure despite millions of claims. People’s data is being leaked from this platform. Anyone can extract this data. Such a claim has been made by an Austrian research group.

According to this research group, every WhatsApp user’s phone number, his profile peak and profile text are being leaked. A research group at the University of Vienna has taken advantage of a simple weakness in WhatsApp’s contact discovery tool. They entered billions of phone numbers one by one into the system and checked which numbers were active on WhatsApp or not.

Removed phone numbers of 3.5 billion active users

According to the news of Wired, researchers extracted the phone numbers of 3.5 billion active users. They also got the profile pictures of 57% of these users. Researchers also easily obtained the profile text (About) of 29% of the accounts. Since there was no rate limit on WhatsApp’s browser-based system, they were able to check 100 million numbers every hour. He says this could have been the largest phone number data exposure in history.

No improvement even after warning

Researchers said that in 2017 too, an expert had warned WhatsApp about a similar flaw. But WhatsApp’s parent company Meta did not take adequate steps to strengthen the rate limit. This time also the researchers did not face any hindrance in sending a large number of requests to the Contact Discovery system. He says that as easily as they were able to extract this data, any cyber criminal could also use this technology equally easily.

The company fixed the flaws

Researchers told Meta about this flaw in April. Later deleted its collection (Dataset) of 3.5 billion phone numbers. The company addressed this shortcoming by implementing strict rate limiting measures in October.

What does the meta say?

Meta told Wired that the data was publicly available basic information. The photos and text of users who had set their profile privacy could not be exposed. No private messages or data protected by end-to-end encryption has been leaked. The company said they have found no evidence of any malicious activity abusing this flaw.

Largest data exposure ever

According to University of Vienna researcher Alyosha Judmayer, this is the most extensive example of exposure of phone number and profile data ever recorded. Co-researcher Max Gunther has said that had they been able to extract this information so easily, others would have quietly done so.