What happens when hackers discovery a vulnerability on one of the Internet’s most visited websites? A lot of spam, identity theft, viruses, and plenty of misinformation.
Last week, YouTube was a prime example of this when hackers found a vulnerability on its video pages that allowed hackers to do everything from preventing comments to blocking videos from playing, and redirecting users to fake, virus infected websites.
As more hackers learned about this vulnerability, the attacks spread to pop-ups with rumors, redirecting users to disturbing videos and websites, and even told users that they were infected by a virus and the way to cleanse the computer was by deleting the system32 folder from their computer. In reality, system32 is crucial to your computer’s well-being, and deleting it would destroy the computer.
However, YouTube did it’s job by minimizing the damage by fixing the problem within a few hours. The company disabled commenting so that hackers couldn’t execute more attacks, and within a few hours everything was back to normal.
The lesson here is that you come across a site that is acting unusual, it’s best to avoid the website or report it. If you see something unusual going on with the site, try to find out more information about it from a different source and avoid links that can lead you to potentially virus infected websites.
(Via Sunbelt Blog)