According to reports, Internet search giant Google has plugged the hole used by the hackers yesterday to hack YouTube videos with off-colour pop-ups and adult-site redirects. The IDG News Service reported that the hackers took advantage of a cross-site scripting vulnerability to insert code onto the viewer-comments pages of the popular video site.
The hackers apparently had it in for young singing sensation Justin Bieber, who’s reportedly one of the most popular attractions on YouTube. The hackers targeted clips related to Bieber, who’s set to appear tonight on an NBC television celebration of the Fourth of July. The IDG report added that a Google representative said that the attackers’ exploits would have prevented them from accessing the Google accounts of YouTube visitors who encountered a hacked page.
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The representative said that visitors could avoid any danger by logging out of their Google accounts and then logging back in. IDG also quoted a source, who claimed that the hackers did not use any malware, but it was likely that any landing pages to which visitors were redirected could have shown the presence of malware. The source, however, added that most antivirus software is capable enough of providing defence against that possibility.
Google closed the comment sections of YouTube for a brief period in order to prevent any major technical problem. “Comments were temporarily hidden by default within an hour [of discovering the problem], 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,” IDG quoted the company as saying.