WhatsApp: Half a million invitation links for private group chats public
from David Wurm 
on February 22, 2020, 8:32 | 🔥 popular | Write a comment
A bug in WhatsApp is currently causing Google to list almost half a million invitation links for group chats. Most of the groups are very private groups that you can just join because of this mistake. Facebook doesn't seem to really care.
Just join WhatsApp groups via Google? Sounds crazy at first, but it's really possible due to a recent bug. Due to the presumably missing robots.txt file, which prevents search engines from indexing pages, these invitation links simply appear here. This bug was made famous by Jane Manchun Wong via Twitter, known for their security efforts.
Join private WhatsApp groups easily via Google
You enter in the Google search field site: chat.whatsapp.com one, all almost 500.000 indexed WhatsApp groups appear. You can enter site: chat.whatsapp.com name also search for a specific group name. After a short test I couldn't find any of my groups, but some from the area that one could easily join. These include some Fridays for Future organization groups or group chats from volunteer fire brigades.
If you also select results in German under “Search filter”, you can display all groups with German group names. As things stand, that's almost 500 groups. Under the discussion on Twitter you can also read from a user who reported the error to Facebook in November 2019. Facebook then replies to the user that there is nothing they can do about what search engines are indexing. Group admins could revoke the link or create a new one. A real solution - apart from revoking the invitation link - is not yet in sight. You can still not join private chats - so these are not affected.
Screenshot: TechnikNews
However, Telegram doesn't do it any better: you can also find this when entering site: t.me/joinchat currently almost 200.000 groups that you can easily join.
Update at 10:30 pm: There was probably too much public pressure on Facebook because the search results have now completely disappeared from Google. However, the results are still displayed on Bing:
Screenshot: TechnikNews
