Linus Tech Tips lost their 6 Billion-view YouTube account due to session cookies

This weekend, one of the most popular YouTube channels, Linus Tech Tips lost its account to crypto scammers. The channel has published more than 6,000 videos and attacked more than 15.3 million subscribers since starting in November 2008 has more than 6.7 Billion channel views.

Linus is the creator of the channel and has detailed the cyber event in a new video today.

The cyber security incident began with the symptom of a new live stream that was sharing an old Elon Musk video. The video featured links in the comments which took any users off to a crypto scam, where they were promised a 2:1 Bitcoin exchange.

Those familiar with the channel would instantly know this is not the kind of content Linus would publish, but with the size of the audience LTT audience, it was likely to fool some.

So how did someone other than authorised Linus Media Group staff publish, and ultimately delete videos from the channel?

Linus’ explanation included some interior security footage of his response where clearly his time to respond was prioritised over everything, including getting dressed.

The standard good security of strong passwords, combined with MFA security was in place, so this was not a case of leaving the door open for the bad guys.

What Linus details, after many hours of investigation, was that session cookies in a browser were hijacked, after a malicious PDF was opened by an employee. These session cookies contained all the privileges necessary to access the channel and what’s more concerning is that these persisted, even after password resets.

Linus has called on Google, owners of YouTube, to implement session cookie expiration, along with some other great ideas around requiring MFA when mass-deleting videos, particularly from another country.

Thankfully Linus Tech Tips has been restored with the help of staff from YouTube and the community and we can all learn from this event. What won’t be recovered is the substantial revenue for the channel for the time the videos were offline.

If you’re keen for the full rundown, make sure you watch the video below.