"Your Contacts Aren't Safe With Popular Messaging Apps, Warn Researchers"

A team of researchers at the Technical University of Darmstadt and the University of Würzburg conducted a study on the privacy of popular mobile messengers, including WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram. They were able to perform practical crawling attacks on these apps using very few resources, posing a significant threat to the privacy of billions of users. Personal (meta) data stored in messengers' user profiles, such as profile pictures, status texts, and nicknames, could be gathered by querying contact discovery services for random numbers. This article continues to discuss the crawling attacks demonstrated by researchers to collect sensitive data from top mobile messengers, as well as the development of accurate behavior models using this data and the impact of this research on service providers. 

TN reports "Your Contacts Aren't Safe With Popular Messaging Apps, Warn Researchers"