Hackers claim to have collected 790 gigabytes of data from TikTok. Security experts call the data real, but the story is more nuanced, and TikTok denies that it was hacked.
More than two billion data, consisting of statistics and personal data, are currently circulating. It would be data from TikTok and WeChat, collected by a hacker group called ‘AgainstTheWest’. Security expert Bob Diachenko also initially confirmed that the data is genuine.
But TikTok itself says it has found no evidence of a breach. That is now leading to a lot of speculation. Initially, it was thought that it was scraping, where public data is taken from profiles, although TikTok also says that it has tools to prevent that.
BleepingComputer assumes that the hack probably took place on an external data player. However, Diachenko later supplemented his earlier confirmation by saying that the data is believed to come from Hangzhou Julun Network Technology, a company separate from TikTok. Troy Hunt of Have I Been Pwned also says that some data is real, but nuances that concern publicly accessible data.
So there is a certain haze surrounding the incident. For the time being, there are no indications that users should change their password or take any other measures. The AgainsTheWest Twitter account has since been suspended. It seems that data about TikTok and WeChat was indeed stolen, but based on what we now know, this is not very sensitive data that also does not come directly from the platforms themselves.
