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- Published: June 8, 2020 15:33
New Delhi: The popular social messaging application WhatsApp is ‘prone to data leak’ and it may put your mobile numbers at risk, a researcher has warned.
The feature ‘Click to Chat’ makes the application compromise your phone numbers as it may be indeed by Google Search, which allows anyone to find them.
As per a report by Threatpost, a cybersecurity researcher Athul Jayaram found a flaw in WhatsApp due to which thousands of WhatsApp numbers can be searched on Google. It is suggested that up to 3,00,000 phone numbers have been leaked on Google Search in plain text. The bug has affected users from India, the US, the UK, and other countries.
However, WhatsApp has stated that is not a big deal and that the results of the phone numbers only show up if the user has chosen to make it public.
About Click to Chat feature
‘Click to Chat’ allows users to initiate a WhatsApp chat with another user without saving their phone numbers in the sender’s address books. This allows websites to interact with their visitors without having the visitor to dial in the phone number.
“As individual phone numbers are leaked, an attacker can message them, call them, sell their phone numbers to marketers, spammers, scammers. Through the WhatsApp profile, they can see the profile photo of the user, and a do reverse-image search to find their other social media accounts and discover a lot more about a targeted individual,” the researcher was quoted saying.
Previous glitches on WhatsApp
Earlier, this year, another bug was found out by a journalist at DW News. In that glitch, WhatsApp invite links for WhatsApp Groups could be indexed by Google, leaving private group links available on Google.
In December 2019, the cyber security researchers had spotted a vulnerability in the app that can cause WhatsApp to crash simultaneously for multiple users on a shared group.
The vulnerability led the app to crash in loop forcing users to reinstall the app. But the users would lose the chat history forever.