Open Source Intelligence (OSINT): Gathering Information on a WhatsApp Account

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Author: aircorridor (AirCorridor), Hackers-Arise contributor
Published: March 7, 2026
Source: https://hackers-arise.com/open-source-intelligence-osint-gathering-information-on-a-whatsapp-account/

Summary

This Hackers-Arise tutorial demonstrates the open-source WhatsApp-OSINT tool for gathering publicly available account metadata about a WhatsApp user starting only from a phone number. It is an OSINT/reconnaissance walkthrough for security practitioners rather than a vulnerability writeup — there is no CVE, no exploit, and no bypass of WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption. The tool simply automates queries against a third-party “WhatsApp OSINT” API and reports back whatever metadata that service exposes. The article covers installing the tool on Kali Linux and interpreting the categories of information it can return.

Technical Details

The tool (a Python project, kinghacker0/WhatsApp-OSINT on GitHub) is a client for a commercial “WhatsApp OSINT” API published on RapidAPI; the user must register a RapidAPI account, subscribe to that API (a limited free tier exists), and place the resulting API key in the tool’s .env file. Setup follows a standard pattern: clone the repo, create a Python virtual environment, install requirements.txt, and configure the key. At runtime the tool prompts for a target phone number in international format (with country code) and offers a menu of lookups backed by six distinct API endpoints. As described in the article, those lookups return: the profile image (available only for business accounts in the author’s test), the account’s status text (e.g. a custom status or “No custom status”), business-account information (the verified/business name and which WhatsApp Business tier is in use — e.g. the free “smb” app versus the WhatsApp Business Platform/API), device information (how many devices are linked to the account), a “full OSINT” option (which during the author’s testing returned only an API-maintenance message), and privacy settings (whether the account presents as public or private). The author notes results depend on what the upstream API returns and that some endpoints were degraded during testing.

Impact

The relevance here is privacy and reconnaissance rather than system compromise. Framed defensively, the article illustrates how much an investigator — or an adversary — can learn about a person from a bare phone number without ever contacting them: confirmation that the number is registered on WhatsApp, any public status text, whether it is a business account and which business tier/verified name it uses, the number of linked devices, and the account’s public/private posture. All of this is metadata the platform (via the commercial API) already exposes; it does not include message contents and does not defeat encryption. Still, presence confirmation plus business details and status text can support social-engineering, pretexting, or target-profiling, which is why understanding this exposure matters for defenders and for anyone assessing their own footprint.

Mitigation

Because this surfaces exposed metadata rather than a software flaw, the practical takeaways are privacy hygiene. Users concerned about this exposure can tighten WhatsApp privacy controls so that profile photo, “about”/status, and last-seen/online are restricted to contacts (or nobody) rather than everyone; be deliberate about what a WhatsApp Business profile publishes, since business accounts expose more (profile image, verified name, tier); and recognize that a phone number itself confirms presence on the platform, so limiting who knows or can guess that number reduces enumeration. Defensively, organizations should treat phone numbers as low-friction pivot points in adversary reconnaissance and include messaging-platform metadata exposure in privacy and threat-model reviews. Note that the capability shown depends entirely on a third-party RapidAPI service, whose data quality and availability vary and which is subject to WhatsApp’s own anti-abuse changes.

References

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