Privacy, Security & Virus Information

YouTube the Latest Victim of Hackers

YouTube, by far the most popular video uploading and sharing site, with close to fifteen billion video clips being viewed and downloaded on average every month must have been a computer hacker's wet dream. With all of these links to be opened, representing almost half of all the video clips viewed online it was only a matter of time till they came under attack.

And sure enough last weekend reports came in of an attack on YouTube by hackers who had succeeded in exploiting a vulnerability that they had discovered in YouTube's cross site scripting. YouTube, for a long time a member of the Google stable, were attacked through the "open door" of the viewer's comment section, which is ultra popular.

Google who have taken vast steps forwards in the issues of computer security in the last year or so, were very quick to react to the problem. Their first step was to completely block of the viewer's comments feature, and a complete fix was installed within a matter of hours. In the meantime heads of the security department at Google are examining the issue in order to ensure that similar issues will not occur in the future.

Security analysts pointed out that the attack had the potential to identify cookies on the computer users that visit a particular YouTube link and from there the way was open to infiltrate the surfer's computer, who, after all, was only trying to listen to a favourite piece of music.

An obvious favourite of the hackers were super popular teen singer Justin Bibber. I must be no coincidence that Justin is the latest hit among teenage girls, who are considerably less security conscious than just about every sector of the surfing community. The hackers, well aware of this fact, succeeded in incorporating some powerful code into YouTube pages devoted to this latest teen idol. Visitors to these pages were directed to links containing provocative messages about their idol, which directed them to external sites which while they didn't contain malware infections, giving cause to believe that this attack was no more than a trial run.

This latest attack once again emphasis the need for computer owners and users to take responsibility for their own security, and install the latest and most powerful anti-virus software. Make your surfing experience as safe as it was meant to be.

 

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