Crypto Hacks Now Seeping to Youtube

The video streaming platform, Youtube has announced a string of hacks plaguing the site, and they all are seemingly linked through crypto. Google’s Threat Analysis Group said the hackers are taking over popular channels and rebranding them as well known crypto corps.

“The channel name, profile picture, and content were all replaced with cryptocurrency branding to impersonate large tech or cryptocurrency exchange firms,” the group said, as well as posting malicious live streams, advertised as giveaways of the coins.

If the hackers are unsuccessful in completing a rebrand they just sell the channel to the highest bidder. The prices range anywhere from $3 to $4,000 a channel depending on the number of subscribers the community may have.

This isn’t even the first time YouTube has had to defend itself against crypto hacks, back in December of last year, Gemini revealed two fake YouTube channels had been pretending to be the popular New York-based crypto exchange.

“These scam accounts are not our company. We have reported these accounts to YouTube,” Gemini tweeted.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone within our industry, if any of you watch channels such as Data Dash or Coin Beuru then you know the comment sections are usually filled with bad actors who pretend to want to help the community, usually larping as a popular crypto YouTubers.

Crypto breeds these acts by the nature of its community and how open we are, the evolution of our interactions are going to change as these problems worsen, and I can only hope that we can come up with a solution before it becomes a plague that we can not handle, leading to a collapse in assets prices.