14 DAY TRIAL // The Redmond company's official Youtube channel was overtaken by some cybercrooks that deleted all the videos and replaced them with short clips.
Youtube channel hacks seem to be the new trend among cybercriminals and after Sesame Street was compromised to serve adult movies, Microsoft's page featured a lot of short advertisements which called out to internauts asking for video responses.
Now the profile is almost fully restored to its original state, but according to Graham Cluley, during the hit there were some interesting messages posted.
One of the notes that seem to be coming from the hacker himself read:
I did nothing wrong I simply signed into my account that I made in 2006 :/
Soon after, the profile was terminated due to violations of Community Guidelines.
In reply, another user revealed that this was probably a slip-up by Youtube:
This is how he "hacked" the channel: He legittly made the account Microsoft when youtube wasn't that big but the REAL Microsoft probably asked Youtube to disable it and give it to them. The flaw is that this account was probably still linked to this kid's email and microsoft forgot to change it or whatever.
So all this kid had to do was recover this account using his old email. Not that hard. Thats probably how the other big Channels got "hacked". Thumbs this up so people can see!
Luckily, this time no illicit content was posted and everything was back to normal in the shortest time, except for the comments and members section which still seems unavailable.
The question remains: how was this possible? Another probable answer besides the one supplied by the customer is that a Microsoft employee who was in charge of the channel had his credentials phished.
Whatever the correct answer is, the situation is still embarrassing for a company of this stature.