TikTok, one of the most popular social networks in the world, suffered a large-scale leak. Hackers managed to steal not only a huge data array of almost a terabyte, but also the source code, since it was practically not protected in any way. In addition, the data of users of the most popular Chinese messenger WeChat were also stolen.
The hack was first reported by a user named AgainstTheWest on the Breach Forums website. The hackers managed to gain access to the database of not only TikTok, but also WeChat, which for some reason were stored in one place. Moreover, the attackers obtained the entire source code of TikTok’s internal backend, which was stored in the Alibaba Cloud and was protected by a not very strong password, says 4PDA.
It is indicated that in total, about 790 GB of data was stolen by hackers with information about 2.05 billion accounts. It is assumed that we are talking about users of both TikTok and the local Chinese version of the Douyin service. So far, the hackers themselves and various experts are studying all this data (some of which was published on the Breach Forums), so the extent of the leak has not been fully determined.
Microsoft employee and cybersecurity specialist Troy Hunt took over the investigation of this case. According to him, the evidence presented so far does not look particularly convincing and some of the data seems to have already been publicly available, and he considers some of them to be “garbage”. NIX Solutions notes that there have also been speculations that the published information may not have come from TikTok, but from a third party integrated into the social network for marketing or e-commerce purposes.