With YouTube being in the top 5 most popular sites on the Internet, chances are this issue may affect a lot of people. While Google admits the vulnerabilities are real, the thing that caught my interest was the person who identified them. It wasn’t a Google/YouTube employee, it was in fact a hacker. This hacker tried multiple times to get the attention of Google and kept all the vulnerabilities private, in hopes that Google would quickly take action to protect their visitors from various threats.

It’s stories like these that I think are fantastic, but it puts a whole different take on hackers. With all the media stating that hackers are nothing but wrong-doers, stories like these yield that there are hackers who try to make things more secure for everyone else.

Google researchers have at last responded to a hacker who says he’s uncovered more than 40 YouTube flaws that put users at risk.

Christian Matthies, says he’s been trying to get the attention of Google bug squashers for the past several months, but was unsuccessful in getting a single reply to his emails warning of the vulnerabilities. That changed this week, a few days after he posted an ultimatum effectively vowing to disclose the bugs publicly if Google didn’t give him some acknowledgment of the problems.

The vast majority of the vulnerabilities are of the cross site scripting (XSS) variety, in which hackers are able to inject unauthorized code by making it appear as if it’s hosted by the website being targeted. Many of the flaws make it possible for an attacker to infect a user’s profile with a quick-spreading worm that could also steal login credentials. In recent weeks, both Googleand Yahoo! have been tripped up by serious XSS errors that put the privacy of millions of their users at risk. [more]

Tags: Hackers, Computer Protection