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Linus Media Group YouTube Channels Hacked

dgianstefani

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The popular tech YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips, along with its associated YouTube channel Techquickie, has been hijacked by crypto scammers. Techquickie has been renamed to "Tesla" and is currently running a crypto scam livestream of a deepfaked Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey and two others. Needless to say, please do not fall for this and prevent your friends and family from doing the same.

Prior to being terminated—likely temporarily, given Linus Media Group is a YouTube partner with a solution on the way no doubt—for being automatically flagged as a result of violating YouTube community guidelines, the Linus Tech Tips channel re-uploaded many older videos, including some that had been marked as "do not publish." It is unclear to what extent Linus Sebastian and other members of LMG are currently aware of this crisis, but as of yet, no updates or statements have been made from the personal account of Linus or the main Linus Tech Tips Twitter account. The most recent Linus Tech Tips tweet is 13 hours old. This post will be updated as more details become available.





Update: The Techquickie channel and its deepfake crypto scam stream has been made unavailable by Google/YouTube.

Update #2: The Techlinked channel, which was also running a deepfake crypto scam stream, has been terminated for violating YouTube Community Guidelines. Linus is aware of the situation and has published a statement on Floatplane:

"Regarding the YouTube channel hack, we are on top of it with Google's team now. Everything should be locked down and we are getting to the bottom of the attack vector with the (hopeful) goal of hardening their security around YouTube accounts and preventing this sort of thing from happening to anyone in the future.

You can expect a more detailed update on WAN Show at some point in the future. Not sure if it'll happen this week since this is still a developing situation.

The good news is that you can expect to get your LTT fix on Floatplane as usual - Linus"

Update #3: Linus Media Group YouTube channels have been restored, after just one day of losing control to crypto scammers via session cookie hijacking. Linus Tech Tips has released a video outlining the events of the last day.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site
 
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That sucks, I'd be interested to know exactly how these scammers accomplished this.
 
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It would be a sour morning woups joke from someone...

Not like tossing something on the floor on purpose. :D
 
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No, it's a public service post to prevent people from falling to a crypto scam while also showing that even the largest of tech YouTube channels can be hacked.
Thank You for posting this, this story is obviously something this community would like to know about
 
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The business team woke up pretty quickly. [link]

1679575440857.png
 
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That sucks, I'd be interested to know exactly how these scammers accomplished this.
I'd guess it was because they share access to the accounts internally (which is pretty much necessary at LTT scale) and something somewhere with that access was vulnerable.
They did talk on their podcast recently about how they're trying to move password managers, but I don't think it's related.
I do hope and expect for them to reveal details once it's settled.
 
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Time to test Linus's new Vault storage server?
They might have to upload the whole thing once again.
 
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I may not be a fan of Linus in general (though I recognize his work as invaluable to bring tech to a wider, less savvy audience), but it is a shame that he fell victim to a "cryptocurrency, blockchain, NFT and Web3 enthusiast" in their natural habitat and state of behavior. The worst of all is that this was probably done by a virus or in an automated manner, because the reach this channel has is worth far more than just a Musk-themed scam campaign.
 
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I was wondering when did I subscribe to Tesla?! This explains it!
 
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Hi,
Not enough drama to be real so it's not fooling anyone but never know what types actually stalk ltt's content so they would probably believe anything put out there :laugh:
 
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tbh that elon musk tesla stream is less clickbaity as their own videos.
 
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I'm on the LTT forums, and the site's absolutely swarming with newly signed up users talking about this situation, to the point of the site slowing down. There's a megathread on this situation over there, doesn't stop people from trying to open another new thread and getting their thread locked.
 
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Hi,
Yeah never a good thing to use abc123 as a password ltt and staff :slap:
 
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Will the channel be able to be restored and all the subscribers?
 
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I watched LTT show off a new 500Mhz refresh rate monitor last night. Then this happens...
 

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Was very confused why I got Tesla notifications this morning. Thanks for pointing this out to me. Me and my coworkers will get a good laugh out of more bitcoin fails.
 
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Noticed a lot of accounts being hacked recently, there are some stupid conditions in place which restrict from names being changed again after for certain amt of time.
 
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Noticed a lot of accounts being hacked recently, there are some stupid conditions in place which restrict from names being changed again after for certain amt of time.

How these hacks bypass 2FA?

@R-T-B You know?
 
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How these hacks bypass 2FA?

@R-T-B You know?
Could be a inside job, MITM, use of common passwords, compromised internet at their publisher.... Lots of ways 2FA can fail when its more than a person or two running a show.
 
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Crypto can't be banned soon enough.
 
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