Google has fixed an issue that could have revealed your phone number to anyone - here's what you need to know

• A security researcher found a way to bypass Google's anti-bot mechanism
• This allowed them to automate guessing the number
• Google fixed the flaw and thanked the researcher

Google has fixed a flaw which was able to expose the phone number associated with any Google account, putting people at different privacy and security risks.

A security researcher with the alias ‘brutecat’ uncovered a way to bypass the anti-bot protection which prevented people from spamming password reset requests on Google accounts.

This allowed them to cycle through every possible combination until they were able to get the correct phone number. Later, they were able to automate the process, resulting in the phone number being guessed in roughly 20 minutes (depending on how many digits the number has).

Risks of exposed numbers

There are multiple privacy and security challenges that stem from an exposed phone number. For one ...