TikTok is suspected of leaking billions of records.
Hackers claimed to have collected billions of TikTok user records, but the platform said no data was leaked.
September 3 Account on the platform specialized in hacker information business In the West It announced that it owns a large amount of data collected from two Chinese social networking services, TikTok and WeChat. Two days later, this hacker claimed to have a 790GB database containing 2.05 billion records including user data, source code, cookies, authentication codes and server information.
In the West It claims to collect large amounts of data from TikTok and WeChat.
WeChat has yet to comment, and TikTok says the information is incorrect. “Our security team has investigated and confirmed that the snippets in question have nothing to do with Tik Tok’s source code and were never integrated into WeChat,” a spokesman for the platform replied. flash computer On 5.9.
The world’s largest short video service ensures that user data cannot be directly leaked from the platform as it has a tool that prevents scripts from automatically collecting user data.
The answer edge“All of the data samples in question are in the public domain and were not obtained as a result of a system breach,” said TikTok spokeswoman Maureen Shanahan.
In the post, the hacker shared a small sample of the collected data. Several security researchers have confirmed that the leaked information matches the information on the platform. However, it is not possible to verify the information published by TikTok or WeChat.
“The leak is real. We are still verifying the origin of the information. It could be from a third party,” Bob Diachenko said on his personal Twitter account.
follow up flash computer, WeChat and TikTok are Chinese companies but they are owned by two different companies, Tencent and ByteDance. Therefore, the presence of information about both services in one database indicates that there is not a direct attack on the two services. “The said database may be collected by a third party or through an intermediary collecting platform information,” the site speculates.
The above information comes shortly after Microsoft publicly disclosed a critical vulnerability in the TikTok Android app, leading many to believe the leak could be a reality. In fact, the vulnerability was discovered in February, after which TikTok was notified to fix it.
follow up Bloomberg, allegations of the data leak are unclear at this point, but they could raise concerns about TikTok as the US seeks to “turn off” Chinese technology. The United States has repeatedly targeted TikTok as a national security threat. Some members of Congress have proposed banning ByteDance, a short video sharing network, from collecting data about US users and sending it back to the Chinese government.
Lu Kui