Ask HN: Is Tik-Tok Malware?

4 points

6 years ago

Over the weekend, a tweet has "blown up" (linked below), screen grabs of someone speaking with authority about how they reverse engineered TikTok and found it is capturing all sorts of unexpected data (beyond the clipboard capturing, reported last week).

People are asking about this. But this whole story is triggering my BS detector. The tweet is screen grabs quoting "someone on Reddit". The reddit post goes into extensive justification for why they can't provide any proof ("The laptop this work was on has a dead motherboard, it's a MacBook with soldered on SSD so I can't just remove the SSD"... Feels kind of like the dog ate my homework).

I took a look at the permissions the TikTok app is requesting, and they don't seem unusual: Camera/mic and media. The post is alledging: Downloading and executing .zip files, scanning your network, sending geolocation every 30 seconds, sending device and AP MAC addresses, setting up a local proxy server...

Anyone have any further thoughts on this or seen any additional details?

Tweet: https://twitter.com/d1rtydan/status/1277081198624337920

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/fxgi06/not_new_news_but_tbh_if_you_have_tiktiok_just_get/

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