TikTok denies security breach after hackers claim to have records of more than a billion users

TikTok has denied a security breach after posts on hacking forums claimed to have compromised the app’s source code, as well as account details of potentially billions of people. In a statement posted to Twitter, the company said it “found no evidence of a breach,” following an investigation of the claims. The company also told Bloomberg UK that the alleged source code posted by the hackers “is completely unrelated to TikTok’s backend source code.”

Claims of a potential breach had been circulating among the security community after a post on a hacking forum claimed to be in possession of a database with more than two billion entries related to TikTok and WeChat accounts. The hacking group claimed to have obtained the TikTok records from an insecure cloud server.

The supposed hackers published a sample of the TikTok data but, as security researcher Troy Hunt pointed out, it contained data that was already publicly accessible and thus “could have been constructed without breach.” Hunt, who runs the “haveibeenpwned” service, said the data was overall “pretty inconclusive.”