Skip to main content

How Hackers Could Delete Any YouTube Video With Just One Click!

A security researcher has discovered a simple but critical vulnerability in Google-owned YouTube that could be exploited by anyone to knock down the whole business of the popular video sharing website.

Ethical Hacking News



Kamil Hismatullin, a Russian security bod, found a simple logical vulnerability that allowed him to delete any video from YouTube in one shot.

While looking for Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) or Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) flaws in YouTube Creator Studio, Hismatullin came across a simple logical bug that could wipe up any video by just sending an identity number of any video in a post request against any session token.

The bug was simple but critical as it could be exploited by an attacker to fool YouTube easily into deleting any video on its system.
"I've fought the urge to [delete] Bieber's channel," Hismatullin wrote in his blog post. "Luckily no Bieber videos were harmed."
Citing the consequences of the issue, Hismatullin said "this vulnerability could create utter havoc in a matter of minutes in [attackers'] hands who could extort people or [just] disrupt YouTube by deleting massive amounts of videos in a very short period of time."
The researcher reported the bug to Google, and the search engine giant fixed the issue within several hours. Hismatullin won $5,000 cash reward from Google for finding and reporting the critical issue and an extra $1337 under the company’s pre-emptive vulnerability payment scheme.

Over a month ago, a similar bug was reported in Facebook's own systems that could have exploited by attackers to delete any photo from anyone’s Facebook account. However, the social networking giant fixed the relatively simple issue.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

Create Your Own Social Networking Site

Create Your Own Social Networking Site JCOW: Ethical Hacking Top 10 reasons to choose Jcow:- 1. Handle more traffic - Clean codes and Dynamic caching can lower the CPU load and  speed up your website. 2 Make your site more interactive - Well designed Jcow applications help you members to connect and communicate with others more effectively. 3 Add questions to the Registration Form - You can add new member fields, which will be displayed to the registration form, profile form, and the member browsing form. 4 Easily share stuff - Within the AJAX sharing Box, your members can publish status,  photos, videos, and blogs. 5 Customize and Extend your Jcow Network - A Jcow network consists of core apps(like "Friends" and "Messages") and optional apps(like "Blogs" and ""Videos"). You can enable/disable optional apps. You can also develop your own apps. 6 Every profile could be Unique - Members can customize their own profile theme and  add music play...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Problem of Abstraction in Definitions of Data Objects

I think there is a major problem in not being able to understand and work with different levels of abstraction.  By "abstraction" in this sense I mean one concept system that somehow describes or defines (not merely relates to) another concept system.  I think this is a big problem for definitions in data models. Let us take an example in a retail business such as mortgage banking: Customer Name.  Customer Name exists in the business.  They use it all the time.  Maybe it is sometimes called Borrower Name, but the concept is the same.  This is the Level 1 abstraction. Now let us think of data values in a column in a table that holds Customer Name.  These data values are stored as a code of 1's and 0's.  Of course these bits are rendered into something we can read.  However, this is not the same as the Customer Name in the business.  I worked for a place where they prefixed the name of anyone who had recently left with "ZZZ"....
Post a Comment
Read more

The Humpty-Dumpty Principle in Definitions

In dealing with empty concepts, we came across the issue that if somebody uses a term that potentially has an unintelligible definition, they are likely to defend themselves by quickly making up some kind of definition.   I strongly suspect that in such cases, the usage of the term will be inconsistent with the definition.  Which brings us to Humpty-Dumpty. Lewis Carroll (Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) is best known for his children's' books Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass .  It is in the latter that Humpty Dumpty - an argumentative egg perched on a wall has the following exchange with Alice: 'And only one for birthday presents, you know. There's glory for you!' `I don't know what you mean by "glory",' Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. `Of course you don't -- till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"' `But "glory" doesn't mean "...
Post a Comment
Read more