And a follow to this threat, researchers have shown that they scan scrapped 3.5 billion WhatsApp mobile phone numbers and associated personal information by abusing a contact-discovery API that lacked rate limiting.
The research paper is here,
https://github.com/sbaresearch/whatsapp-census/blob/main/Hey_there_You_are_using_WhatsApp.pdfAnd according to the paper, WhatApps is being most globally by this countries:
- India: 749 million
- Indonesia: 235 million
- Brazil: 206 million
- United States: 138 million
- Russia: 133 million
- Mexico: 128 million
No wonder why Brazil is one of the target here and for sure those countries mentioned could be in their next iteration of the code.
