Security News
President Donald Trump said Friday he will bar fast-growing social media app TikTok from the United States as American authorities have raised concerns the service could be a tool for Chinese intelligence. Speaking to reporters on Air Force One, Trump said: "As far as TikTok is concerned, we're banning them from the United States."
Pakistan's Telecommunications Authority has banned one Chinese-owned social video-streaming app Bigo and given TikTok a final warning that it needs to get its house in order or also face expulsion. The Authority's beef with the apps is not security-related, despite the TikTok mobile apps twice being observed reading from mobile devices' clipboards.
A top White House official said he expected President Trump to act firmly against the TikTok and WeChat social media apps, prompting an angry response from China on Monday. Trump last week had said he is considering banning the wildly popular TikTok app as a way to punish China over the coronavirus pandemic.
Roughly five hours after an internal email went out Friday to Amazon employees telling them to delete the popular video app TikTok from their phones, the online retailing giant appeared to backtrack, calling the ban a mistake. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said this week that the government was "Certainly looking" at banning the app, setting off confused and irritated posts as well as jokes by TikTok users.
Any Chingari User Account Can Be Hijacked in Seconds The Chingari app for iOS and Android asks users to register an account by granting basic profile access to their Google accounts, which is a standard part of OAuth-based authentication. Chingari Patch Update To Be Released Today Kumar responsibly disclosed the issue to the makers of Chingari earlier this week, and the company in response acknowledged the vulnerability.
Any Chingari User Account Can Be Hijacked in Seconds The Chingari app for iOS and Android asks users to register an account by granting basic profile access to their Google accounts, which is a standard part of OAuth-based authentication. Chingari Patch Update To Be Released Today Kumar responsibly disclosed the issue to the makers of Chingari earlier this week, and the company in response acknowledged the vulnerability.
Amazon today said an internal email banning its staff from using TikTok on smartphones connected to their corporate inboxes was sent in "Error." The admission - or climb down, depending on how skeptical you are - came after the memo was obtained and leaked by journalists. So what Amazon's trying to say now is that it was wrong to ban TikTok from mobile devices: its policy is that it's OK to use the software on phones used for work email.
TikTok denied Tuesday sharing Indian users' data with the Chinese government, after New Delhi banned the wildly popular app in a sharp deterioration of relations with Beijing two weeks after a deadly border clash. "TikTok continues to comply with all data privacy and security requirements under Indian law and have not shared any information of our users in India with any foreign government, including the Chinese government," TikTok India chief Nikhil Gandhi said in a statement.
In March, researchers Talal Haj Bakry and Tommy Mysk revealed that Android and iOS apps - including the mind-bogglingly popular, China-owned, video-sharing/often in privacy hot water TikTok - could silently, automatically read anything you copy into your mobile device's clipboard. Mysk said that the ability for apps to read content of off nearby devices means that an app on an iPhone could possibly read sensitive data on the clipboards of other connected iOS devices, be they cryptocurrency addresses, passwords, or email messages, even if the iOS apps are running on a separate device.
A new privacy feature in Apple iOS 14 sheds light on TikTok's practice of reading iPhone users' cut-and-paste data, even though the company said in March it would stop. Apple added a new banner alert to iOS 14 that lets users know if a mobile app is pasting from the clipboard and thus able to read to a user's cut-and-paste data.