WhatsApp’s Usernames Option Will Help Limit Data Exposure | Social Media Today

Hey, remember how I reported earlier in the month that WhatsApp will soon enable the use of usernames, instead of phone numbers, as the primary identifier in the app? Yeah, turns out there’s a security reason for that, with Austrian researchers finding that you can just enter every single possible phone number combination, through automated process, and find contact information, including name and profile images, for every WhatsApp user in existence. Which they claim is a significant security flaw, that WhatsApp’s parent company Meta has failed to address for years. As reported by Wired, a team of Austrian security researchers used this method to extract 3.5 billion users’ phone numbers from the platform. As per Wired: “For about 57% of those users, they also found that they could access their profile photos, and for another 29%, the text on their profiles. Despite a previous warning about WhatsApp’s exposure of this data from a different researcher in 2017, they say, the service’s parent company, Meta, still failed to limit the speed or number of contact discovery requests the researchers could make by interacting with WhatsApp’s browser-based app, allowing them to check roughly a hundred million numbers an hour. ” Using this
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