Linus Tech Tips, one of the largest tech channels on YouTube, was offline. Now the boss explains how the outage occurred.
On March 23, Linus Tech Tips, one of the most well-known tech channels on YouTube, suddenly went offline. We reported that Linus Tech Tips had been hacked. Instead of tech videos, there were strange crypto videos and links to scam offers visible.
Meanwhile, the channel is back online, and Linus Sebastian, the head of the channel, explains in a video how the hack occurred. In fact, the hackers used a very simple trick.
Phishing email causes the outage of the popular YouTube channel
What exactly happened? Linus explained that an employee opened an email. The simplest trick that hackers can use to gain access to your PC:
Someone from our team downloaded something that looked like a sponsorship offer from a potential partner. All in all, it was a harmless mistake. The email came from a seemingly legitimate source and did not trigger any immediate warning.
The team member tried to open the PDF file in the email, but nothing happened. The mistake was then that this problem was simply ignored and no one noticed it. The rest happened in a few seconds:
What happened in the background took about 30 seconds. The malware accessed all user data from the two installed browsers, Chrome and Edge, including all locally stored passwords, cookies, and browser settings. This allowed them [the hackers] to get an exact copy of these browsers on the target computer, which they could export, including, that’s right, the session tokens for every logged-in website.
You can watch and listen to his entire statement in the official YouTube video:
How can such a thing be prevented in the future? He explained that employees need to be better trained. When people start in the company, they should be directly informed that there are scammers out there who are targeting accounts and valuable data.
Additionally, better structures are needed that must come into play in an emergency. Then he wouldn’t have had to jump out of bed at 3 a.m. and take care of rescuing his channel.
Especially when a channel like Linus Tech Tips is worth millions of euros:
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