Techlore @techlore.tech · Nov 18 🚨 MASSIVE: Researchers scraped 3.5 BILLION WhatsApp phone numbers using the app's contact discovery feature, along with profile photos and bios for millions of people. This would be "the largest data leak in history" if it hadn't been done by researchers 🧵
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too bad! the researchers got the pfp I left on WhatsApp:
Here's how simple it was: WhatsApp lets you check if a phone number is registered. Researchers automated this for every possible number combination at ~100 million checks per hour. Meta had ZERO effective rate limiting in place (because why would anyone want that?)