TikTok denies reports of being hacked

Short-form video app TikTok has denied reports that it has been hacked.

Social media was sent into overdrive on Friday, when a hacker group identifying as ‘AgainstTheWest’ posted on a forum with claims that they had breached TikTok along with messenger app WeChat. The user also shared screenshots of what they claimed to be a database belonging to the companies, accessed on an Alibaba cloud instance. 

The hacker group claimed to have access to a 790GB database containing 2.05 billion records such as user data, platform statistics, software code, cookies and server information. 

In response to the claims, a spokesperson for TikTok told BleepingComputer that it is false, and that the source code shown is not part of its platform. The spokesperson also told the outlet that the user data could not come from a direct scraping of its platform as the company has safeguards in place to prevent automated scripts from collecting user info. 

They said: “This is an incorrect claim — our security team investigated this statement and determined that the code in question is completely unrelated to TikTok’s backend source code, which has never been merged with WeChat data.”

Security expert and HaveIBeenPwned creator Troy Hunt posted a Twitter thread on the subject, where he said that while some of the data are valid, there is nothing detailed that is not already publicly available. 

The ‘AgainstTheWest’ hacker collective was set up to target companies that act in opposition to western interests. Former US president Donald Trump previously identified TikTok as an enemy of the US.