2 Simple Ways a TikTok Hacker can Manipulate You

Learn what a TikTok hacker can do and how you can protect yourself

Share This Post

So, you want to be a TikTok hacker, but how do you go about it? In this guide, we will show how easy it is for a TikTok hacker to steal your information or manipulate accounts and people, and how you can protect yourself.

As a disclaimer for this TikTok hacker guide, remember that you are responsible of your own actions. The purpose of this article is to show how things happen and how you can protect yourself, if you misuse this knowledge for ill purposes then it will be your sole responsibility.

Before we can start, we should have a brief definition of who is a TikTok hacker. In short, we can say:

A TikTok hacker is someone who uses often illegitimate ways to control other people’s accounts, or to manipulate the platform to get more views and likes.

How can the TikTok hacker do all that? Let’s see this in this guide.

TikTok Hacker’s Method to Break into an Account

Why break into an account?

If you control a TikTok account, you can post content and reach followers. If an account has a lot of followers, then it will be naturally more valuable as its content gets distributed to more people. This is true for all social media platforms, and not only TikTok.

Because of this, the more followers an account has, the more it will be target of TikTok hackers. Furthermore, if the account is about something that may be controversial, such as politics, hackers will like it even more.

A TikTok hacker can do a lot of things with your TikTok account
TikTok is full of hackers, learn today what they can do.

There are two main reason a hacker may want to try to steal a TikTok account:

  1. To post content from that account, for example creating spam or advertisement content (the reasons behind that are typically fame and money)
  2. To post “bad” content from that account, to discredit it. This is typical of hacktivism and happens with political figures all the time

So, the TikTok hacker has some reasons to break into an account, maybe even yours. But how does he go about it?

How TikTok Hackers Steal Accounts

Think about TikTok as a large server holding all accounts. You have two ways to get into an account, either know its password and just log in, or violate the TikTok server to bypass the password check or steal the password somehow. The problem with that is that TikTok is secure, and it’s hard to get through. Furthermore, TikTok developers keep updating their systems against security vulnerabilities frequently, and that is the case for any large online website.

In short, breaking into TikTok itself can be time consuming and complex, if not even impossible. If done, however, anyone who does that would have access to potentially all TikTok accounts in the world. Still, if you are reading this guide it means this is probably out of reach for you just yet, and indeed most TikTok hackers do not even try this route. Instead, they try the phishing route.

Phishing is deceiving someone to give you his personal information, typically his password. The TikTok hacker will attempt to get the password directly from the user owning the account. Once the hacker has the password, he can just log in and boom!

How TikTok Phishing Works

The easiest way to do phishing is to disguise yourself as a legitimate company, typically TikTok itself. The TikTok hacker will send an email to the TikTok owner of the account, pretending to be TikTok and asking the password.

Of course, the request is never so naïve as “give me your password”. It is much subtle than that. Typically, the TikTok hacker will send an email that asks to log in into the TikTok app or website to check something or reset a password. All good, except the user is not logging into TikTok for real, but on a fake website that only aims to collect the password. So, the TikTok hacker will need two things to do phishing:

  1. A credible email that seems sent by TikTok, referencing a fake website (see next)
  2. A website that resembles a lot TikTok, but in reality, stores the password in a place the hacker can access it

If all of that seems complex, you will be surprised to know that almost everyone can pull this off in a few minutes to a few hours. How? Just continue reading.

The Phishing Email

The first step is the phishing email. As the TikTok hacker needs to have it as similar as possible to a real TikTok email, the best place to start is with a “real” email from TikTok. The password reset email is a good start. To get one, go to the TikTok website and attempt to login with username and password.

To log in in TikTok, the hacker will use username and password
Log in with username and password.

Now, we need to switch to login through email rather than phone.

To get an email, we need to attempt to login with username and password
Switch to email login.

At this point, we need to click on “Forgot password?” to initiate the password reset.

To get an original email to modify, the TikTok hacker will fake a password reset by clicking on forgot password
Click on Forgot password?.

Finally, the TikTok hacker needs to use his own email and click send code. This will make TikTok send him an email to reset the password. The hacker wants to use his own email because in this way he can get an original email he can modify. Hence, to do it, he needs to have his own TikTok account first, even if not used.

To ask for a password reset, the TikTok hacker will click on Send Code
Insert your email and click on Send Code.

And there we go; we now have the original TikTok email. The TikTok hacker can now modify it and send it to his victim.

This is the original TikTok email created when resetting the password
Original TikTok password reset email.

Modifying the Phishing Email

Now, the hacker needs to modify the phishing email to ask the user to put the password somewhere and use a link to a fake website, rather than the real TikTok. This is also an extremely simple step, and it can be done in Microsoft Outlook.

The TikTok hacker will forward the email in Outlook
Forward the email to edit it.

When you received the email from TikTok, you only need to forward it and modify its text. A common approach most TikTok hackers use is to ask to input the password to avoid having the account blocked and asking to do that soon. Below, and example of a phishing email.

This is a phishing email crafted by a TikTok hacker
This is the phishing email as modified by the TikTok hacker.

This is it, the TikTok hacker can now send this to his victim. Before he does so, however, he needs to create the malicious website to collect passwords.

Creating a Malicious Website

To create a malicious website that looks like TikTok, the TikTok hacker would start from TikTok itself. Luckily, we can clone the TikTok website. Just go to the login page and clone the HTML code using the developer tools (open them by pressing F11 on the keyboard).

Original TikTok form that the TikTok hacker will replicate in a malicious website
The original login form to be cloned.

We now need to inspect the form and change its behavior. Specifically, we need to add an action to it that allows it to store password. Hence, we need to look for the following piece of code:

The original HTML form that the TikTok hacker is going to modify
The original HTML form, pay attention to the highlighted line, it will be the one that is modified.

And modifying it as follow, adding the action and method attributes on the form HTML element.

TikTok Hacker's Modified HTML FOrm
The form line has been changed.

At this point, we need to create the store.php script. This will receive the passwords, store them in a TXT file that the TikTok hacker can access whenever he wants, and then redirect the user to the real TikTok so he will be not aware of the phishing attack.

The content of your store.php script file should be as follows.

// Dump the request to a file
$req_dump = print_r($_REQUEST, true);
$fp = file_put_contents('credentials.txt', $req_dump, FILE_APPEND);

// Send the user to real Instagram
header('location: https://tiktok.com');

Boom, the script will now save all the passwords in a TXT file. You now need to upload all these files into a server and share that as a malicious URL in your phishing emails. You are now a TikTok hacker!

If you are confused about how to do exactly all that don’t worry, at the end of the guide we have additional tutorials you can follow that go into the details.

TikTok Hacker’s View Farming Method

Beyond hacking accounts, another popular use of TikTok hackers is farming views. That is, generating tons of views on your account, and even followers. This is something that is done and sold, that is: some companies sell views and followers created in “farms”.

A farm is place where they have thousands of phones neatly organized in racks and always kept charging. These phones have TikTok installed and some click-bot app as well, and their role is to automatically scroll through TikTok, watch and like videos and accounts. It is like a crowd of followers, except they are fake. This is not complex hacking, it only requires having many phones.

Furthermore, some advanced farms are able to register new accounts to TikTok by themselves to grow to an even larger number of accounts managed.

The TikTok hacker who sets up a farm can then sell views and clicks from those phones, and people who want to have a quick start in the number of followers tend to buy them.

Protect Yourself from TikTok Hacker

To protect yourself from the TikTok hacker, you need to practice some common sense. Here are some good tips you should always follow.

  • Check who is sending you emails, beware of communications that look “strange”
  • Whenever you input your username and password, ensure you are always on tiktok.com in the URL bar
  • Enable two-factor authentication with code sent through SMS, never send the code you receive via SMS to anyone
  • Beware of comments that look “weird”, they might be automatic and generated in a farm

True, TikTok hackers can try to hack you, but if you are cautions you will be safe.

TikTok Hacker in Summary

Long story short, a TikTok hacker is someone who uses not-so-legit techniques to manipulate what happens on TikTok. He will attempt to steal accounts through some phishing and use legions of cheap phones to get more likes. With some patience, anyone can become a TikTok hacker. If this article inspired you, you should check also:

Hacking is a complex topic but knowing about is crucial in the modern world. Hopefully, you know a little bit more about hacking thanks to this article.

Picture of Alessandro Maggio

Alessandro Maggio

Project manager, critical-thinker, passionate about networking & coding. I believe that time is the most precious resource we have, and that technology can help us not to waste it. I founded ICTShore.com with the same principle: I share what I learn so that you get value from it faster than I did.
Picture of Alessandro Maggio

Alessandro Maggio

Project manager, critical-thinker, passionate about networking & coding. I believe that time is the most precious resource we have, and that technology can help us not to waste it. I founded ICTShore.com with the same principle: I share what I learn so that you get value from it faster than I did.

Alessandro Maggio

2022-03-03T16:30:00+00:00

Prime Opportunity

Hacking

55000