If you’ve been on the lookout for social networks lately, surely you heard the rumor that TikTok would have suffered a massive hack, which would have led to an equally massive information leak. However, the company has just assured that this was not the case.
Last Friday, a user named Againststthewest published an alleged 790GB database that in theory contained 2 billion histories, data, statistics, software source code, cookies, authentication tokens, server information and more, both TikTok and WeChat, 2 of the most important Chinese apps of the moment.
People’s concern was great, because together the apps have billions of users around the world. However, it seems that this information was false, at least partially. A TikTok spokesperson contacted the site Bleeping Computer and confirmed that the source code that was published did not belong to the social platform.
“This is an incorrect statement: our security team investigated this statement and determined that the code in question has no relation to the source code of the TikTok backend, which was never merged with the WeChat data.”
Apparently, the hacker or group of hackers published information from both platforms in their supposed database in a linked way, however TikTok itself confirmed that their private information was never linked. So, the criminals are lying, at least partially.
Troy Hunt, cybersecurity expert and creator of the site Have I Been Pwned? he commented on this, after analyzing the published database. He stated that the data is inconclusive, because although there is accurate information in that database, it is information that can be reviewed publicly in any way, so there is no proof that TikTok or WeChat were really hacked.
Apparently, this alleged hack is not real. WeChat, for its part, has not commented on this.
