Why YouTube \u201cwanna be friends?\u201d comments aren\u2019t as friendly as they seem YouTubeYouTubers are increasingly concerned about a channel that is potentially putting other accounts at risk by simply interacting with a friendly comment: \u201cwanna be friends?\u201d Spotlighting the issue was YouTuber \u2018Evanz11\u2019 who noticed a recurring theme across videos on the platform who had a relatively smaller reach or audience. Without fail, they would find the same comment, or closely structured ones, on uploads made by an account called \u2018logan.\u2019 \u201cThousands of people have lost their entire channels from this one, innocent comment,\u201d Evanz said. \u201cAnd it\u2019s one of the largest security breaches I\u2019ve seen YouTube go through.\u201d The prevailing theory suggests that the person behind logan, as well as suspicious alternate names such as \u2018Triby\u2019 or \u2018Sounds,\u2019 just to name a few, figured out a way to somehow gain enough access to other people\u2019s YouTube accounts to simulate organic channel growth. \u201cIf you look at his first few videos, you\u2019ll see his Comments [section is] just nothing,\u201d Evanz explained. \u201cThings people would literally never comment\u2026 Yeah, the real way he grew his channel so large was using bots. They\u2019re all bots, but bots using real accounts. Your accounts.\u201d It is unknown how logan\/Triby is seemingly gaining access to accounts that simply interact with the \u201cwanna be friends\u201d comments on other people\u2019s videos. Mutahar Anasnote from the \u2018SomeOrdinaryGamers\u2019 channel looked into the suspicious activity and believes the problem is a bit more nuanced. According to Mutahar, the YouTube breach could be tied to the OAuth token system that lets accounts from different services interact and manipulate each other with prior user consent. When linking accounts, apps will ask for permission to run the \u2018tokens\u2019 that it needs to perform its duties. There are some tokens, however, that ask for the ability to see, edit, or delete YouTube videos, ratings, comments, and captions in order to perform its functions. While apps that ask for these permissions are not inherently malicious or bad, Mutahar believes logan found an exploit to use this token, or one like it, for the purposes of gaining surface-level access to other accounts. For the time being, YouTubers are self-monitoring and unlinking their accounts to any third-party app that asks for these kinds of permissions as more evidence suggests that one of those services might have been compromised.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Why YouTube \u201cwanna be friends?\u201d comments aren\u2019t as friendly as they seem YouTubeYouTubers are increasingly concerned about a channel that is potentially putting other accounts at risk by simply interacting with a friendly comment: \u201cwanna be friends?\u201d Spotlighting the issue was YouTuber \u2018Evanz11\u2019 who noticed a recurring theme across videos on the platform who had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64635"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64635\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}