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Famous Viner Gets All His Snip Clips Deleted by Hacker

Victim contacted Vine to restore the money-making content

Mar 10, 2015 15:34 GMT  ·  By
Sadness all over Ben Phillips' Vine profile
   Sadness all over Ben Phillips' Vine profile

An unknown individual took control over the Vine account of Ben Phillips and deleted all the seconds-long clips available.

Phillips, 22, can be considered a very famous viner, his profile being followed by 1.3 million people, while the current loop count is more than 287 million large. Loop counts are recorded each time a Vine video is played.

His vines make plenty of money

The incident occurs just a few days after the 22-year-old disclosed that he made thousands of pounds from the video snippets he published.

After attracting a large number of followers, he started to be approached by different companies that wanted their products promoted through his vines.

One of the contracts was with Ford, who paid no less than ₤12,000 / €16,800 / $18,000 for a six-second video. Phillips says that this happened the moment he hit one million followers and that he got paid more than this for other clips.

Talking to the BBC about the hack, Phillips was unable to explain how it all happened, since passwords were changed on a weekly basis and the email address for the log-in was “completely generic,” making the credentials impossible to guess.

Attacker may have relied on well-crafted phishing to get the log-in info

However, Phillips was not clear on whether his account benefited from two-factor authentication (2FA), which would increase the security.

An attacker would not have to bother with guessing the access data when a well-designed phishing page could have the owner of the account hand over the information. Combined with lack of two-factor authentication, the success of the operation is granted.

The young viner has contacted Vine about the possibility of restoring his content. In a tweet on Tuesday he said that he was confident that the company would make the clip snippets available again. Otherwise, he would have to start all over again.

Important to note is that Vine content is rendered on any platform straight from the account of the owner. Deleting a clip makes it unavailable on any website sharing it.