TikTok Denies Hacking Event Data of 2 Billion People Compromised?
TikTok is becoming more and more dominant, with young people, in particular, storming the network, which specializes in short videos. However, there are always doubts about how secure the service, originally from China, is. Now there is said to have been a huge hack – but TikTok denies this. The rapid development of TikTok is unprecedented even in the fast-moving world of social media, as it has reached almost two billion users in just a few years.
On the one hand, this is due to the fact that the network is particularly popular in China and, on the other hand, to the fact that there has long been no getting around TikTok in the West either. But recently, the question of the security of TikTok has arisen – once again. As how Bleeding computer reported, a hacker group calling itself AgainstTheWest published a post in a relevant forum claiming that it was possible to gain access to TikTok and the messenger WeChat. It shared screenshots of an alleged database owned by the companies and allegedly accessed on an Alibaba cloud instance.
Real hack or just public data tapped?
All in all, more than two billion data sets and thus also users are said to be affected, the total volume is said to be a massive 790 gigabytes, including user data, platform statistics, cookies, authentication tokens, source code, and much more. How young people prefer to communicate AgainstTheWest (ATW) is already a well-known name in the scene and you shouldn’t let it mislead you. Because “Against the West” is not opposed to it, on the contrary.
According to security expert CyberKnow, ATW is explicitly fighting for the West: “Don’t let the name confuse you, ATW is targeting countries that they see as a threat to Western society. They currently have China and Russia in their sights and plan to also attack North Korea, Belarus, and Iran in the future.” However, TikTok denies that it is a hack: Opposite The Verge TikTok spokeswoman Maureen Shanahan said: “We have been able to confirm that the data samples in question are all in the public domain and are not the result of a compromise in TikTok’s systems, networks or databases.
We are confident that users do not need to take any proactive measures, and we remain committed to the safety of our global community.” According to Troy Hunt, the founder of the Have I Been Pwned database, TikTok actually seems to be telling the truth here: “The results so far are inconclusive; some data is consistent with production data, even if it is publicly available. Some data is junk, but it could be non-production or test data,” writes Hunt Twitter.
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