Record breaking data leak stems from WhatsApp vulnerability

More than 3.5 billion WhatsApp users had their personal data exposed following the exploitation of an enumeration vulnerability in the Meta-owned messaging platform, marking the most significant information leak yet, reports The Register.

Inputting 63 billion phone numbers generated by a Google libphonenumber-based tool allowed the collection of user information from over 100 million accounts per hour, according to researchers from the University of Vienna and SBA Research.

"To our surprise, neither our IP address nor our accounts have been blocked by WhatsApp. Moreover, we did not experience any prohibitive rate-limiting," said researchers, who discovered profile pictures in over 57% of active accounts enumerated by the tool, as well as profile texts in almost 29% of accounts.

Further analysis revealed that 50% of phone numbers included in the massive Facebook data scraping incident four years ago continued to be part of the information obtained from WhatsApp. Meta has already used the study to bolster its anti-scraping systems.