A huge numbers of online complaints via social media and updates by news sources created a small pandemonium today when YouTube was hacked by the famous internet prankster group 4chan and a few other computer whiz kids. A huge number of videos went down but the biggest brunt was felt by the 16 year old American pop star, Justin Bieber. Almost all Bieber videos showed a black screen with ‘Fail’ written on it or all sorts of messages claiming responsibility for the activity.
The hackers exploited a vulnerability in the site’s comment system which erroneously allowed HTML to be injected in to comments which it’s not supposed to. As a result the hackers used it on the site and users experienced pop up messages and even got directed to porn and malware hosting sites.
YouTube was quick to take action and disabled comments immediately before fixing the bug and restoring the site within 2 hours.
This, however, was not the first incident in the last 24 hours or so. iTunes faced a similar scenario over the Independence day weekend in the US when a large number of iTunes accounts were reported hacked and were used to buy hundreds of dollars worth of apps in the App store. The source was recognised early when it was revealed by a blogger that 40 of the top 50 iPhone apps in the Books category were created by Vietnamese developer “Thuat Nguyen”. A lot of account holders reported to Apple about never downloading the apps that were charged to them. Apple said it’s looking into the issue.
After the above 2 incidents, it was natural to be alarmed when Wikipedia went down today and the message on the site read “Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties.” Foul play was once again suspected but the site appeared back online in about an hour with Wikipedia’s official Twitter page saying “Thanks for being patient, everyone. We’ve figured out the problem: power outage in our Florida data centre. Slowly coming back online!”
[via Mashable]
You Might Also Like:
Like this post? Post Comment and Subscribe RSS
Pingback: Tweets that mention Youtube & iTunes Hacked, Wikipedia Down | PelWaves -- Topsy.com()