The popular Linus Tech Tips YouTube channel has been hacked with the name changed to one associated with Tesla, promoting scam videos that suggest Elon Musk is doing a crypto giveaway, and forcing the owners of the account to use a temporary handle. At the time of writing, visiting the channel’s original YouTube page brings up the message: “This account has been terminated for violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines.”
This comes after another tech channel, Eteknix, was hacked a few weeks ago. Fortunately, their channel was eventually recovered, along with all of their videos and content. It appears that YouTube is having some lingering issues when it comes to account security surrounding access.
Elon Musk deepfakes used in Linus Tech Tips hack
Scam videos that showed on the Linus Tech Tips channel appeared to use Elon Musk deepfakes, pushing a fake crypto giveaway across two simultaneous livestreams. The first stream stayed up for around 20 minutes before being taken down, while the second was live for over 35 minutes.
For now, the channel is operating under the name “LinusTechTipsTemp,” and the handle “@temporaryhandle.” While their original videos were being deleted, they are slowly being returned, and it should just be a matter of time before the channel is back to normal. Unfortunately for Linus Tech Tips, videos that are labeled with “do not use” and “do not upload” are also making their way online.
For now, it’s unclear exactly who is responsible for the hack, and exactly how they managed to gain access to the Linus Tech Tips channel. Two affiliated channels, Techlinked and TechQuickie, were also compromised, with the same video being posted under a different name. Both have now been terminated.
Linus released a statement to their site Floatplane following the hack, saying that they are “on top of it with Google’s team,” and that they “are getting to the bottom of the attack vector with the (hopeful) goal of hardening their [Google’s] security around YouTube accounts and preventing this sort of thing from happening to anyone in the future.”
