Towards Cybersecurity

When new users install popular mobile messengers (like WhatsApp, Telegram, or Signal), users can start messaging existing contacts based on the mobile numbers stored on their mobile devices instantly. For this, users must allow the app permission to access and transmit their address book to company servers frequently which is called mobile contact discovery . According to a team of researchers from the Secure Software Systems Group and Privacy Engineering Group, currently deployed contact discovery services highly threaten the privacy of billions of mobile messengers users . A team of researchers also demonstrated the practical crawling attack on popular mobile messengers like WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal. And the results of this experiment show that hackers can collect private sensitive data at a very large scale and without significant restrictions by querying mobile contact discovery services for any random mobile numbers .  For further study, the team of researchers queried aroun