The rapidly rising social networking platform TikTok, became the new victim of hackers who want to access users' personal data.
Η breach of account security by hackers can be easily used to modify the content of videos posted on the platform. In addition, hackers will also be able to access the personal data of social network users.
Cybersecurity researchers at CheckPoint Research say they have discovered "many vulnerabilities" in TikTok. According to experts, these vulnerabilities allow hackers to send SMS messages containing malware to social network users. Hackers can easily "hide" their appearance and make victims believe that these messages come from TikTok itself.
By clicking on one of these infected messages, the hacker will be able to take control of his target account. In addition, he will be able to access the victim's downloaded and personal videos or even post news. In addition, CheckPoint claims that another security loophole allows it to exploit user's personal information stored on TikTok servers.
"All the vulnerabilities we found are at the heart of TikTok's systems", said Oded Vanunu, head of product vulnerability research at CheckPoint. The company specializing in computer security informed TikTok about its discoveries on November 15, 2019. The social network claims that it has fixed all these defects since December 5, 2019.
TikTok has reached almost 1,5 billion users worldwide in just two and a half years since its release outside China. It is targeted by hackers because of the large amount of data and possibly the personal information it contains. Because applications like TikTok can be used across multiple platforms, it is easier for a malicious person to scale up their activity quickly.
Before this story was revealed to the public, we had agreed with CheckPoint to cover all the issues mentioned in the latest version of our application. We hope that this successful solution will encourage future collaborations with security researchers.
These security concerns arose shortly after the United States Navy decided to ban TikTok from its employees' smartphones. According to the official statement of the US General Staff, the social network is a threat to national security and it was decided to ban sailors and officials of this House from using the Chinese social network.
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