TEL AVIV, Israel -- TikTok, the smartphone app beloved by teenagers and used by hundreds of millions of people around the world, had serious vulnerabilities that would have allowed hackers to manipulate user data and reveal personal information, according to research published Wednesday by Check Point
TEL AVIV, Israel — TikTok, the smartphone app beloved by teenagers and used by hundreds of millions of people around the world, had serious vulnerabilities that would have allowed hackers to manipulate user data and reveal personal information, according to research published Wednesday by Check Point, a cybersecurity company in Israel.
TikTok learned about the conclusions of Check Point’s research Nov. 20 and said it had fixed all of the vulnerabilities by Dec. 15. TikTok has exploded in popularity over the past two years, becoming a rare Chinese internet success story in the West. It has been downloaded more than 1.5 billion times, according to the data firm Sensor Tower. Near the end of 2019, the research firm said TikTok appeared to be on its way to more downloads for the year than better-known apps from Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Snap.
“Like many organizations, we encourage responsible security researchers to privately disclose zero day vulnerabilities to us,” he added. “Before public disclosure, Check Point agreed that all reported issues were patched in the latest version of our app. We hope that this successful resolution will encourage future collaboration with security researchers.”TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, is one of the world’s most valuable tech startups.
“I would expect these types of vulnerabilities in a company like TikTok, which is probably more focused on tremendous growth, and on building new features for their users, rather than security,” said Christoph Hebeisen, the head of research at Lookout, another cybersecurity company.
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