TikTok denies data breach following leak of user data

Threat actors published a sample of data allegedly stolen from TikTok, but the company denies it was breached.

The hacking collective AgainstTheWest recently published a post on Breach Forums message board claiming to have hacked TikTok and stolen source code and user data. The group published screenshots of an alleged stolen data, it claims to have had access to an Alibaba cloud instance containing data for both TikTok and WeChat users.

Threat actors reported that the server contained 2.05 billion records in a 790GB database.

TikTok denies AgainstTheWest’s claims.

“TikTok prioritizes the privacy and security of our users’ data. Our security team investigated these claims and found no evidence of a security breach.” a company spokesman told to the media.

“Our security team investigated this statement and determined that the code in question is completely unrelated to TikTok’s backend source code,” a spokesperson added.

The popular data breach hunter Bob Diachenko and his team analyzed publicly exposed data and confirmed their authenticity, but they are unable to determine the origin.

It is not clear if the source of the data is the Chinese firm or a third-party partner.

TikTok also told Bleeping Computer that the leaked user data could not result from a direct data scraping activity because the company has adopted security measures to prevent this practice.

I’ll continue to follow the story … stay tuned!

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, TikTok)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.