Your WhatsApp number may be available in plain text on Google search. Here's the details.
As per cyber report, mobile numbers of many WhatsApp users is available via a simple Google search. Here are the details.
As per cybersecurity researcher, mobile number of several WhatsApp users available via a simple Google search. In a blogpost, researcher discovered a “privacy issue in the WhatsApp web portal that leaked around 29000 – 300000 WhatsApp user’s mobile numbers in plain text accessible to any internet user.
This privacy issue could have been avoided if Whatsapp encrypted the user mobile numbers as well as by adding a robots.txt file disallowing the bots from crawling their domain and a meta noindex tag on the pages, unfortunately they did not do that yet and your privacy may be at stake.
With a big user base, they should care about these vulnerabilities. Today your mobile number is linked to your Bitcoin wallets, Aadhaar, bank accounts, UPI, Credit cards leading an attacker to perform SIM card swapping and cloning attacks by knowing your mobile number is another possibility.
WhatsApp has a “click to chat feature where the links are generated as https://wa.me/”,. This feature he revealed, “does not encrypt the phone number in the link, as a result, if this link is shared anywhere, your phone number is also visible in plaintext.
https://wa.me do not have a robots.txt file in its server root, which means you cannot stop Google or other search engine bots from crawling and indexing the wa.me links, which means those links will stay in the web. The pages do not have noindex meta tags to prevent any search engines from indexing the links.
The impact of this may be unknown people messaging you. It could also be possible that marketing executives, cybercriminals, fraudsters find your phone number and target users.
Moreover, if the user’s Whatsapp privacy settings are set to public the scammers may also be able to get access to your profile picture, name, profile status and more details. Not just that cybercriminals may also land up calling or text messaging you given they have your number already. suggests that “the best way to avoid the situation maybe to delete your Whatsapp account or change your mobile number.”
To find out which mobile numbers appear on Google Search type site:wa.me followed by . For example, if you wish to find the Indian mobile numbers available on Google type site:wa.me “+91” on the search bar.
