According to a recent investigation, there has been a wave of hacks targeting the accounts of famous YouTubers. The YouTubers affected mainly had channels dealing with cars and auto-tuning.
Some of the most famous YouTubers in the automotive community on YouTube have already fallen victim to the attacks. The channels that have been affected are: Built, Troy Sowers, MaxtChekVids, PURE Function and Musafir.
However, it's not just car creators who were reportedly affected. Other YouTubers also reported last week that their accounts had been hacked. The attacks occurred mostly over the weekend. Most YouTubers reported the incident in posts on Twitter and on YouTube's support forum
Organized campaign
The YouTuber account breaches were part of an organized campaign in which hackers sent fake messages to users urging them to visit various sites. In reality, these were phishing sites that helped the hackers gain access to the credentials YouTuber's.
Information about the attack was revealed by a YouTuber who managed to recover his account after the breach. The YouTuber received information from YouTube staff:
Initially, hackers sent phishing emails to victims and led them to fake Google, which helped them collect users' credentials.
then gain access to the YouTubers' Google accounts and give the victims' channels to new owners.
By changing the channel URL, the real owner and his subscribers thought the account had been deleted.
Some users reported receiving personal emails. Others said they received emails that also contained the addresses of many other YouTubers, usually from the same community or from others.
There were also reports that hackers were able to bypass two-factor authentication on users' accounts. The hackers likely used Modlishka, a reverse proxy-based phishing toolkit that can obtain passwords sent via SMS.
However, there is no evidence that the hackers actually used Modlishka. They may have used any other similar tool.
Whatever the situation, the only thing certain is that the hackers somehow managed to bypass the authentication, since Ryan Scott, owner of the PURE Function channel, confirmed that he was using this method to protect his account.
