New Delhi, Nov 20: A major vulnerability in WhatsApp left the personal details of nearly 3.5 billion users exposed, a research report from the University of Vienna has claimed.

The team of researchers uncovered a weakness in the platform’s contact discovery feature that allowed them to systematically check every possible phone number and identify active WhatsApp accounts on a massive scale.

Meta, the owner of the messaging service, was made aware of the problem and has taken steps to resolve the issue.

They generated over 100 million queries per hour using an automated method and ultimately gathered information on users from 245 countries.

Although the information retrieved was limited to data already visible to anyone having a phone number — such as public keys, profile photos, “about” text, and timestamps — the researchers said these fragments were enough to infer additional insights, including a user’s operating system, how long they had been on the platform, and the number of linked devices.

But what makes the discovery even more troubling is that a similar warning had been issued eight years ago. In 2017, a security researcher had flagged the absence of limits on the number of phone number checks a user could perform-a gap that made large-scale scraping possible.

Despite this early warning, the vulnerability remained unpatched until the University of Vienna team showed just how easily it could be exploited.

They extracted 30 million U.S. phone numbers in the first half hour of testing and continued collecting data without resistance from the WhatsApp servers.

Meta, in a statement to 9to5Mac, said it appreciated the researchers’ role in uncovering the vulnerability and credited the researchers for their role in identifying a novel enumeration technique that outsmarted its intended safeguards.

The company said it had already been working on advanced anti-scraping systems, and the study helped confirm the effectiveness of these new protections. Meta also confirmed the data had been securely deleted by the researchers and added that it did not find any evidence of malicious exploitation of the vulnerability.

Geneva, Nov 20: A whopping 316 million women and 12.5 million adolescent girls worldwide faced sexual violence in the last 12 months, according to a report released by the World Health Organization (WHO) on Thursday.

The report, released ahead of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women and girls observed on November 25, noted that violence against women remains one of the world’s most persistent and under-addressed human rights crises and has made little progress in the last two decades.

Nearly one in three women — estimated 840 million globally — have experienced partner or sexual violence during their lifetime — a number that has hardly changed since the year 2000.

In the last 12 months, 316 million women — 11 per cent of those aged 15 or older — were subjected to physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner.

About 12.5 million adolescent girls — 15-19 years of age or 16 per cent — have experienced physical and/or sexual violence from an intimate partner.

Progress on reducing intimate partner violence has been painfully slow, with only a 0.2 per cent annual decline over the past two decades, stated the report.

For the first time, the report also includes national and regional estimates of sexual violence by someone other than a partner.

It found 263 million women have experienced non-partner sexual violence since age 15, a figure experts caution is significantly under-reported due to stigma and fear.

“Violence against women is one of humanity’s oldest and most pervasive injustices, yet still one of the least acted upon,” said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General.

“No society can call itself fair, safe, or healthy while half its population lives in fear. Ending this violence is not only a matter of policy; it is a matter of dignity, equality, and human rights,” he added.

The report also highlighted the lack of funding for initiatives against sexual violence, warning that humanitarian emergencies, technological shifts, and rising socio-economic inequality are further increasing risks for millions of women and girls.

It called for decisive government action and funding to scale up evidence-based prevention programmes to strengthen survivor-centred health, legal, and social services; investing in data systems to track progress and reach the most at-risk groups; and enforcing laws and policies empowering women and girls.