Linus Tech Tips Hacked by Crypto Scammers

Tom Warren writing for The Verge:

Popular YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips has been hacked this morning, with the channel’s 15.3 million subscribers seeing videos for crypto scams instead of tech hardware reviews. It’s the latest breach in a series of high-profile YouTube accounts being hacked, with scammers regularly gaining access to prominent accounts to rename them and livestream crypto scam videos.

The account was eventually suspended, presumably as YouTube employees work to restore it. Other Linus Media Group YouTube channels, including Techquickie and TechLinked, have also been breached and given new names focused on Tesla.

It’s not immediately clear how the channels have been breached, but owner Linus Sebastian tweeted that he was aware of the situation. Later, in a statement posted to Floatplane (a streaming service spun out of Linus Media Group), he said that the company is working on it with Google, and is “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.” He also promised to discuss additional details on the company’s podcast, though warned they might not come this week as it’s “still a developing situation.”

Sisi Jiang writing for Kotaku:

LTT fans have noted that almost a decade’s worth of videos were deleted. Sebastian has backed up his old videos using a “Vault” backup system, and is an advocate of using the 3-2-1 method of storing data across multiple storage devices (including one offsite).

Every time I have seen a YouTube channel get hacked like this YouTube usually finds a way to restore the channel to something close to how it was before the attack. That said, I truly hope Linus does have his videos stored somewhere else just in case.

If you learn anything from this consider looking into backing up your work and perhaps follow the 3-2-1 method for backups.