TikTok denies a security breach as hackers claim to have over a billion user records

After posts on hacking sites claimed to have exposed the source code of the app and the account information of potentially billions of users, TikTok denied a security breach. After looking into the claims, the business issued a statement on Twitter claiming that it has “discovered no evidence of a breach.” Additionally, the business informed Bloomberg UK that the allegedly uploaded source code “is absolutely unconnected to TikTok’s backend source code.”

After a post on a hacking site claimed to have access to a database with more than two billion records relating to TikTok and WeChat accounts, claims of a possible breach started to spread among the security community. According to the hacker group, a cloud service that was not protected is where they got the TikTok recordings.

Security expert Troy Hunt noted that although the so-called hackers released a sample of the TikTok data, it contained information that was already available to the public and “could have been produced without intrusion.” The data was often “very inconclusive,” according to Hunt, the owner of the “haveibeenpwned” service.

Even though TikTok has vehemently denied a hack, the data in the database may have originated from other sources. According to Bleeping Computer, it can be the outcome of data being scraped from the service by a data broker or some other third party.

Just a few days prior, Microsoft researchers said that they had discovered a “high-severity vulnerability” in TikTok’s Android app that put millions of accounts at risk. Now, there have been claims of a security breach. Microsoft reported that the bug was resolved less than a month after it informed TikTok of the vulnerability in February 2022. Concerns regarding TikTok’s security procedures and the data that it shares with its parent firm ByteDance are not new. In a bid to allay worries, the firm declared last month that Oracle will evaluate its algorithmic and content moderation systems.