A newly emerged menace actor, going by the alias “Often9,” has posted on a distinguished cybercrime and database buying and selling discussion board, claiming to own 428 million distinctive TikTok consumer information. The submit is titled “TikTok 2025 Breach – 428M Distinctive Traces.”
The vendor’s submit, which appeared on the discussion board yesterday (Might 29, 2025), guarantees a dataset containing detailed consumer data resembling:
- Electronic mail addresses
- Cell phone numbers
- Biography, avatar URLs, and profile hyperlinks
- TikTok consumer IDs, usernames, and nicknames
- Account flags like private_account, secret, verified, and ttSeller standing.
- Publicly seen metrics resembling follower counts, following counts, like counts, video counts, digg counts, and good friend counts.
Why This May Be Severe
The inclusion of private fields resembling electronic mail addresses, cell phone numbers, and inside account flags just isn’t one thing that may be casually scraped from TikTok’s public-facing web site or cell app. If these particulars are verified by TikTok to be correct and up to date, it suggests entry to both inside TikTok programs or an uncovered third-party database.
Including to the load of the declare, the menace actor is keen to work by way of a intermediary, a standard strategy on legal boards when large-scale information gross sales require third-party verification to construct purchaser belief.
However Right here’s Why Skepticism Is Warranted
Regardless of the attention-grabbing gross sales pitch from the menace actor, a number of purple flags solid doubt on the validity of the declare. Importantly, a major variety of pattern entries present empty or generic fields for emails and telephone numbers, elevating the chance that this dataset was put collectively from scraped public profiles and organised utilizing outdated breach information or guesswork.
The menace actor is a brand new account on the discussion board, having joined solely days in the past, with no status, neither optimistic nor detrimental. Within the cybercrime world, status is forex; main breach sellers sometimes have years of verified historical past or previous profitable gross sales.
The discussion board itself has a latest historical past of inflated or false breach claims. Notably, the identical platform was used final week to advertise a so-called “1.2 billion Fb consumer” information sale, which was later uncovered as faux in an unique Hackread.com investigation, resulting in the vendor’s ban.
A better have a look at the pattern information reveals that many fields, consumer IDs, usernames, profile hyperlinks, and follower metrics, are publicly accessible and might be obtained by way of large-scale scraping operations. Whereas scraping at scale can nonetheless pose dangers (like phishing or spam campaigns), it doesn’t equate to a breach of inside programs.
Cross-Checking Electronic mail Addresses with HaveIBeenPwned
Hackread.com additionally cross-checked the e-mail addresses within the pattern information towards information on HaveIBeenPwned, and most have been present in fewer than two earlier information breaches. That is alarming and provides some legitimacy to the individuality of the information. Nevertheless, a 1,200-line pattern from a supposedly 428 million document breach just isn’t sufficient to determine legitimacy.
For now, this declare needs to be handled with warning. As tempting because the gross sales numbers could also be, reputationless sellers on cybercrime boards typically exaggerate or fabricate to make a fast revenue or entice consideration.
Not The First Time
This isn’t the primary time a menace actor has claimed to breach TikTok’s information. In September 2022, a hacker claimed to have acquired 2 billion TikTok information, together with inside statistics, supply code, 790 GB of consumer information, and extra, a declare that was later denied by the corporate.
However, Hackread.com has reached out to TikTok for remark. This text will likely be up to date accordingly.
