Not everyone spent the Fourth of July weekend kicking back and enjoying themselves.
Some people have very strange ideas about “fun”. Rather than spend the Fourth of July weekend with friends, fireworks and possibly some tasty beverages, some people decided that their time was best spent messing with Justin Bieber fans.
YouTube came under attack, as hackers took advantage of a scripting flaw in the website. Anyone trying to watch a Justin Bieber video encountered blacked-out pages, fake messages saying that Bieber had died in a car crash, or shock pornography. YouTube disabled comments for two hours while it fixed the problem.
“We took swift action to fix a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability on youtube.com that was discovered several hours ago,” wrote Google in a statement to TNW. “We took swift action to fix a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability on youtube.com that was discovered several hours ago. Comments were temporarily hidden by default within an hour, and we released a complete fix for the issue in about two hours. We’re continuing to study the vulnerability to help prevent similar issues in the future.”
4Chan was apparently responsible for the attacks, with one poster saying that it was a reminder that its members could “still shake the foundation of the internet.”
Source: TNW via The Daily Mail