On March 23, 2023, the tech review giant - Linus Tech Tips’ main YouTube channel was hacked and turned into a crypto scam channel. Linus, the CEO of the company, was rudely awakened at 3 am to multiple reports of the hack. The LTT community rallied against the hackers, even going as far as using superchats to warn viewers of the scam livestream.

The hack was not complicated and many channels on YouTube have been hacked in the same way. ThioJoe’s YouTube channel (youtube.com/@thiojoe) explains how channels are hacked. Typically, hackers send fake emails, such as a sponsorship or a YouTube DMCA email, with a PDF or other attachment. When the attachment is opened, it grabs the browser’s session token for that Google account. For more information on this process, I recommend watching ThioJoe’s video .

The LTT team was put into overdrive on March 23, 2023 as they tried to recover their YouTube channel. The entire team, including the developers, worked to recover the channel. Linus stated that “it wasn’t like someone targeted the password directly to get into the account, but, instead, they went after the whole browser profile, which made it even more difficult to combat.” The malware that the hacked employee downloaded accessed all user data in less than 30 seconds from both their installed browsers, Chrome and Edge. This included locally saved passwords, cookies, and browser preferences. The hackers were effectively given an exact copy of those browsers on the target machine, which allowed them to export session tokens for every logged-in website. Linus also stated that the hack could have been easily avoided but doesn’t blame anyone for the mistake, saying “it could have happened to anyone.” Google was very open and helped Linus and his team recover their channels within 24 hours of the hack. To learn more about the hack from the source, I recommend watching the latest episode of the WAN show .

As a content creator myself, I feel that it’s essential to address this cybersecurity issue. I hope that Google takes action to stop these hackers as it’s a significant problem. Thank you for reading this post, and I hope it was informative.