“Linus Tech Tips,” a popular tech channel hosted by Linus Gabriel Sebastian on Alphabet Inc.‘s (NASDAQ:GOOGL) YouTube with 15.3 million subscribers, was hacked last night.
What Happened: On Friday, “Linus Tech Tips” posted a video on YouTube (after getting their account back online) titled “My Channel Was Deleted Last Night.”
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In the video, the YouTuber talked about how “Linus Tech Tips” was deleted, TechLinked was toasted and Techquikie was gone — this kind of attack has become common on YouTube.
The YouTuber said, “The fireworks started a little after 3 in the morning when the Linus Tech Tips account was renamed Tesla and started streaming a podcast-style recording of self-proclaimed Technoking Elon Musk discussing cryptocurrency.”
The stream was linked to a “scam website that claimed that for every one Bitcoin you sent, they would return double complete with fake transaction records other users definitely getting huge payouts.”
The YouTuber went through multiple steps to outmaneuver hackers but to no avail. Linus Tech Tips, TechLinked and Techquikie were used to “host these Elon Musk crypto streams” for a couple of hours until YouTube nuked them.
All three channels are now online.
Watch the video here:
At the time of writing, the video had been viewed more than 350K times.
Benzinga reached out to Sebastian and Google for comments and will update the story as and when we receive a response.
Check out more of Benzinga’s Consumer Tech coverage by following this link.
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