Enumerating Three Billion Accounts on WhatsApp [pdf](github.com)
github.com
Enumerating Three Billion Accounts on WhatsApp [pdf]
https://github.com/sbaresearch/whatsapp-census/blob/main/Hey_there_You_are_using_WhatsApp.pdf
1 comments
Abstract—WhatsApp, with 3.5 billion active accounts as of
early 2025, is the world’s largest instant messaging platform.
Given its massive user base, WhatsApp plays a critical role in
global communication.
To initiate conversations, users must first discover whether
their contacts are registered on the platform. This is achieved
by querying WhatsApp’s servers with mobile phone numbers
extracted from the user’s address book (if they allowed access).
This architecture inherently enables phone number enumeration,
as the service must allow legitimate users to query contact
availability. While rate limiting is a standard defense against
abuse, we revisit the problem and show that WhatsApp remains
highly vulnerable to enumeration at scale. In our study, we were
able to probe over a hundred million phone numbers hourly