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Microsoft's cybersecurity team said Wednesday that hundreds of millions of TikTok users could have their accounts taken over because of a 'high severity' security flaw in the Android app.
Researchers said that hackers could have taken over a TikTok user's account by getting them to click on a single link.
Dimitrios Valsamaras of Microsoft's 365 Defender research team wrote, "Attackers could have used the vulnerability to take over a user's account without them knowing if the user clicked on a specially made link."
"Attackers could have then gotten into users' TikTok profiles and sensitive information and changed it, such as by making private videos public, sending messages, and uploading videos on users' behalf."
TikTok fixed the flaw after Microsoft told them about it, and neither company has seen any evidence that hackers took advantage of it.
It was said that the iPhone version of the app was not affected.
More than 1 billion people use the social media app that is owned by China.
"Through our work with security researchers at Microsoft, we found a flaw in some older versions of the Android app and quickly fixed it," a TikTok representative told The Post. "We appreciate the work the Microsoft researchers have done to help us find possible problems so we can fix them."
Hundreds of millions of Android users around the world could have been affected by the bug if it hadn't been found. More than 1.5 billion times, people have downloaded the app from the Google Play Store.
According to Microsoft's report, the security team was able to make a link that let them into a user's account without their password.
As part of a test, when a user clicked on the link, Microsoft changed the user's account to say "!! SECURITY BREACH!!!"
"This case shows how important it is to be able to coordinate research and threat intelligence sharing through expert collaboration across industries," Valsamaras wrote. "We will keep working with the security community as a whole to share research and information about threats in order to make everyone safer."
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