{"id":975315,"date":"2025-11-20T09:49:33","date_gmt":"2025-11-20T04:19:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/?p=975315"},"modified":"2025-11-20T10:20:48","modified_gmt":"2025-11-20T04:50:48","slug":"massive-whatsapp-security-flaw-exposed-phone-numbers-and-profile-photos-of-billions-of-users-worldwide-were-you-affected","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/2025\/11\/20\/massive-whatsapp-security-flaw-exposed-phone-numbers-and-profile-photos-of-billions-of-users-worldwide-were-you-affected\/","title":{"rendered":"Massive WhatsApp security flaw exposed phone numbers and profile photos of billions of users worldwide: Were you affected?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A significant privacy flaw in the famous and widely used instant messaging platform WhatsApp has exposed the phone numbers and profile photos of 3.5 billion people across the world. Cybersecurity researchers had discovered that a technical issue allowed external websites and third-party tools to access user information even without being added as contacts. <\/p>\n<p>Researchers at the University of Vienna were able to pull 3.5 billion phone numbers by leveraging a \u201csimple\u201d method that took advantage of WhatsApp\u2019s contact-discovery feature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A significant privacy flaw in the famous and widely used instant messaging platform WhatsApp has exposed the phone numbers and profile photos of 3.5 billion people across the world. Cybersecurity researchers had discovered that a technical issue allowed external websites and third-party tools to access user information even without being added as contacts. Researchers at the University of Vienna were able to pull 3.5 billion phone numbers by leveraging a \u201csimple\u201d method that took advantage of WhatsApp\u2019s contact-discovery feature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,64,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-975315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-newspapers","category-telecom-the-financial-express","category-the-financial-express"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/975315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=975315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/975315\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=975315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=975315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=975315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}