There was a giant YouTube hack on April 13th where a group of hackers changed the video title and description of hundreds of YouTube videos. Here is an article about the incident:
https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2017/04/14/ourmine-youtube-hack-heres-protect-account/
It appears that a YouTube Network, Studio71, was targeted, and many YouTubers from the network had their accounts hacked and video titles & descriptions changed to a URL and hashtag about "OurMine." Apparently the hackers had no intent to be malicious with their changes and, according to the article, were planning to restore everything back to the way it was. Some YouTubers who were attacked said that YouTube was also working to restore the titles and descriptions, but that they weren't sure what that would do to their comments and views that happened since the last backup. I'm not sure which restore happened first (the hackers restore, or YouTube's restore), but at least everything was restored!
Here's a picture from the article:
I'd imagine that these YouTubers have had a rather substantial decrease of their video SEO rankings during this whole ordeal, and it's scary to think that this could happen on such a large scale. This also reveals that the YouTube security is rather weak. Although changing a video title/description is annoying, I find it more concerning that a lot of YouTubers have their telephone verification and personal information tied to their accounts in some form, yet how "easy" it seemed to be for the hackers to access their accounts. I always thought having the telephone number verification check would add a layer of security, but with this hack showing the possibility to hack a section of Google on a massive scale, maybe it's not such a good situation that Google has so much documented information on all of their users. I think it's been more of an attack through Studio 71 rather than Google, but either way it's scary how this has happened across so many channels...
What are your thoughts about this? I think it's scary that the hackers were able to pull this off on so many channels, and I'm expecting to see a lot more of this kind of stuff in the future....
https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2017/04/14/ourmine-youtube-hack-heres-protect-account/
It appears that a YouTube Network, Studio71, was targeted, and many YouTubers from the network had their accounts hacked and video titles & descriptions changed to a URL and hashtag about "OurMine." Apparently the hackers had no intent to be malicious with their changes and, according to the article, were planning to restore everything back to the way it was. Some YouTubers who were attacked said that YouTube was also working to restore the titles and descriptions, but that they weren't sure what that would do to their comments and views that happened since the last backup. I'm not sure which restore happened first (the hackers restore, or YouTube's restore), but at least everything was restored!
Here's a picture from the article:
I'd imagine that these YouTubers have had a rather substantial decrease of their video SEO rankings during this whole ordeal, and it's scary to think that this could happen on such a large scale. This also reveals that the YouTube security is rather weak. Although changing a video title/description is annoying, I find it more concerning that a lot of YouTubers have their telephone verification and personal information tied to their accounts in some form, yet how "easy" it seemed to be for the hackers to access their accounts. I always thought having the telephone number verification check would add a layer of security, but with this hack showing the possibility to hack a section of Google on a massive scale, maybe it's not such a good situation that Google has so much documented information on all of their users. I think it's been more of an attack through Studio 71 rather than Google, but either way it's scary how this has happened across so many channels...
What are your thoughts about this? I think it's scary that the hackers were able to pull this off on so many channels, and I'm expecting to see a lot more of this kind of stuff in the future....