Researchers discovered a potential data breach in the Chinese short-form video app TikTok on Monday, allegedly involving up to 2 billion user database records. Several cyber-security analysts tweeted about “a breach of an insecure server that allowed access to TikTok’s storage, which they believe contained personal user data.”
Troy Hunt, the creator of the data breach information site haveibeenpwned, started a Twitter thread to determine whether the sample data is genuine or not. The evidence, according to him, is “so far pretty inconclusive.” All of the information was posted on breached forums by BlueHornet| AgainstTheWest.
Well this is going to be interesting – has @tiktok_us been breached? https://t.co/80UGasas1V
— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) September 4, 2022
“Who would have guessed that TikTok would decide to store all of their internal backend source code on one Alibaba Cloud instance using a trashy password?” they tweeted, describing how simple it was to download the data. The threat group known as AgainstTheWest claimed to have extracted over 790GB of data. Over 2 billion records have already been extracted by the threat actor. BlueHornet (Against The West) has shared screenshots and data samples to support its claims.
We tried to reach TikTok but haven’t heard back from them yet.
UPDATE From TikTok
“Our security team has found no evidence of a security breach. We have confirmed that the data samples in question are all publicly accessible and are not due to any compromise of TikTok systems, networks, or databases. The samples also appear to contain data from one or more third-party sources not affiliated with TikTok. We do not believe users need to take any proactive actions, and we remain committed to the safety and security of our global community.” A TikTok spokesperson
