A HACKER HAD THE OPPORTUNITY TO DELETE EVERY VIDEO ON YOUTUBE.
- by C.J. Havens
- Apr 2, 2015
- 2 min read
Just imagine all of YouTube gone in a poof. All of the billion and millions of views from popular uploads vanished never to be seen again. One hacker had the chance to do just that but choose to resits the temptation to play Internet God. Russian hacker and security contractor Kamil Hismatullin briefly had the ability to delete everything on YouTube.
Tech companies like FaceBook and Google looking to stay ahead of cyber attacks routinely hire "hackers" to test their security and to point out any weaknesses found in order to prevent malicious attacks. In this such instance it did not take Hismatullin long to find this crack in YouTube's security as he points out on his personal blog:
"In general I spent 6-7 hours to research, considering that couple of hours I’ve fought the urge to clean up Bieber’s channel haha.
Although it was an early Saturday’s morning in SF when I reported issue, Google sec team replied very fast, since this vuln could create utter havoc in a matter of minutes in the bad hands who can used this vulnerability to extort people or simply disrupt YouTube by deleting massive amounts of videos in a very short period of time. It was fixed in several hours, Google rewarded me $5k and luckily no Bieber videos were harmed :D"
Only 5k though? We think that bit of information was worth a lot more!
Hismatullin also uploaded a video (To YouTube of course) of the "attack" which you can view below.
What do you guys think? Did Google low ball this hacker that could have been an internet God?
If you were presented with this choice would you have handed this information over to Google?
Let us know in the comments below.
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