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TikTok Refuses to Accept Data Breach After Hackers Leak Users’ Data

(Image Credit Google)
Reportedly, TikTok denies recent obligations of breaching the source code and stealing user data. However, it said that data given to a hacking company is "completely unrelated" to TikTok. On Friday,  'AgainstTheWest,' a hacking group curated a topic on a hacking forum alleging to have breached both TikTok and WeChat.  Additionally, the user shared screenshots of an alleged database belonging to the companies, which they say was invaded on an Alibaba cloud instance containing data for both TikTok and WeChat users. The hackers say this server holds 2.05 billion records in a massive 790GB database containing user data, platform statistics, software code, cookies, auth tokens, server info, and many more. Meanwhile, the name 'AgainstTheWest' may sound like the hacking group targets Western countries; the threat actors claim to only target countries and companies hostile to Western interests. Cybersecurity Researchers of Cyberknow explained, "Don't let the name confuse you; ATW targets countries they perceive to be a threat to the western society. Currently, they are targeting China and Russia and have plans to target North Korea, Belarus, and Iran in the future," As per reports, TikTok has revealed that the claims of the company being hacked are false. Furthermore, the company said the source code shared on hacking forums isn't part of its platform. TikTok said, "This is an incorrect claim— our society team investigated this statement and determined that the code in question is completely unrelated to TikTok's backend source code, which has never been merged with WeChat data."    TikTok also claimed that the leaked user data could not result from a direct scraping of its platform, as they have adequate security safeguards to prevent automated scripts from collecting user information. More interestingly,  WeChat and TikTok are both Chinese firms; they are not owned by the same parent company, with the former belonging to Tencent and the latter to ByteDance. Henceforth, seeing them both in a single database indicates that it was not a direct breach on each platform. Supposedly, the unprotected database was created by a third-party data scraper or broker who stole public data from both services and saved it into a single database. After that, the two companies are constantly in the spotlight of privacy investigations by national services, so finding such a rich cloud instance containing both companies' data is raising suspicions. Troy Hunt, the creator of the HaveIBeenPwned data breach notification service, confirmed in a Twitter thread that some of the data were valid.  Similarly, "database hunter" Bob Diachenko has validated the leaked user data as accurate but couldn't provide any concrete conclusions about the origin of the data. If further analysis reveals that the data is legitimate, TikTok will be forced to take action to mitigate the leak's effects even if it wasn't breached.

By Raulf Hernes

If you ask me raulf means ALL ABOUT TECH!!

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