Hackers bring down Youtube

HACKERS bought down Google's Youtube on Sunday by using a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability.

The attackers hit sections where users post comments and meaningless observations about videos showing people's cats playing the piano, so those sections were temporarily hidden while Google worked out a fix. It said that it worked out a complete fix for the problem in about two hours.

The attack put at risk the Youtube cookies of users who visited a compromised page, but the cookies couldn't be used to access their Google accounts.

As a precaution, Youtube users should log out of their account and log back in again.

At the centre of the attack were videos featuring the teenage girls' musical heart-throb Justin Bieber.

Whenever users accessed Youtube pages devoted to him they saw tasteless messages pop up. We would have thought it matched the style or worth of his music, but of course all the Bieber fans would disagree.

Users were also redirected to external sites with adult content, something that Bieber fans would not know anything about as most of them think the film Twilight is a good representation of teenage love affairs. µ