14 DAY TRIAL // Following the recent security concerns issued by researcher Christian Matthies, the parent company Google decided to contact him and resolve the flaws. As Christian Matthies said, he sent an ultimatum to the Mountain View company in order to patch the vulnerabilities before they are successfully exploited by a dangerous attacker.
"A few days after I issued the ultimatum, Google Security contacted me and we could successfully fix all known vulnerabilities. I have also talked with Hunter Walk who is Product Manager at YouTube and suggested him to set up a security response team at YouTube to make sure that issues like these are better routed in the future. He promised me to take care of that," he said.
YouTube is a very popular Internet service, and a potential critical flaw discovered in the technology would make a considerable number of Internet users vulnerable to attacks. However, the Mountain View company took measures and managed to fix the issues even before any successful exploitation was reported. Moreover, the company publicly thanked the security researcher and sent him a T-shirt, just as a sign of their appreciation.
"I appreciate this because I think that when a company has a well working security response team and credits reports appropriately, researchers will be way more motivated to report what they have found. The Google Security Team is already doing that and publicly thanks me on. Additionally they sent me a Google t-shirt, which is really cool," the researcher added.
The online video sharing service YouTube was acquired in October 2006 by the Mountain View company that paid no less than $1.65 billion. Since the acquisition was officially announced, it has been kept in the spotlights due either to major improvements or to several lawsuits filed by the companies that accused Google for copyright infringement.