TikTok has been in the crosshairs of media around the world after a group of hackers known as ‘AgainstTheWest’ created a forum thread claiming to have breached TikTok and WeChat.
The account shared screenshots of an alleged database belonging to the companies, which they say was accessed on an Alibaba cloud instance containing data for TikTok and WeChat users. In total, the security breach would affect 2,000 users and would involve an information base of 740 GB.
“We have confirmed that all data samples in question are publicly accessible and not due to any compromise of TikTok’s systems, networks or databases,” TikTok spokeswoman Maureen Shanahan said in a statement to The Verge. . “We do not believe that users should take proactive measures and we remain committed to the safety of our global community.”
Additionally, the company said that the source code shared on hacking forums is not part of its platform.
While the name Against The West may make it seem like the hacking group is targeting Western countries, cybercriminals claim that they are only targeting countries and companies hostile to Western interests.
It should be noted that WeChat and TikTok are Chinese companies, they are not owned by the same parent company, since the former belongs to Tencent and the latter to ByteDance. So seeing both in a single database indicates that it was not a direct breach on each platform.
Troy Hunt, Microsoft’s regional director and creator of the Have I Been Pwned tool, called the data from the hackers “inconclusive” but surmised that “it could be test or non-production data” that was probably not taken. through a gap.
