YouTube was hacked on 4th of July

Well well, you see.. Americans never rest, atleast the hackers – YouTube was hacked on the very day of Independence of America. Pop singer Justin Bieber was targeted by the hackers.

Videos related to Justin Bierber were hit by number of different hacks, such as redirecting video to the infamous “One Man One Jar” video, while other covers the full screen with “OMG Faggot”, a simple twitter search shows that the problem is widespread. Some users are even saying, that they see a message box saying Justin Bieber is dead, you can see below.

Message box claiming Justin Bieber is dead after YouTube was hacked.

So, how did they hack YouTube? Well it seems, the hackers found a exploit in YouTube comments system – placing <script> tag at start of a comment, skips the tag itself, but everything following it is cheerfully placed in the page as is. YouTube is currently blocking such comments from getting posted, comments on many videos, some are not related to Justin Bieber are like this:

Comment used to hack YouTube on a video.

Google took about 2 hours to completely fix the vulnerability in YouTube. Apparently, discussions on the 4chan forums seem to be like, the members of the forum were to be blamed for the hack. Below you can see there messages and comments.

Google gave a official word, confirming the hack and that the exploit has been fixed, as you can see below.

“We took swift action to fix a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability on youtube.com that was discovered several hours ago. Comments were temporarily hidden by default within an hour, and we released a complete fix for the issue in about two hours. We’re continuing to study the vulnerability to help prevent similar issues in the future.” – Google

(source: TheNextWeb, PosterousBlog, Mashable)