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YouTube Hacked?

Posted in findings by christoph.burgdorfer on the April 21st, 2010

I recently found a video called Drum solo 4 on YouTube and I found it would crash my browser. I tried Firefox, Safari and found, it would even crash Chrome. It would block my computer until the browser prompts me to abort the script.

The video plays nicely on the iPhone, however. What struck me was, that it had almost 140′000 views in less than 3 days. This is a lot. Particularly for video of average content like this.

youtube hacked video closed caption

I soon found the explanation for the count: Enter any two words of the English language in YouTube search, and this video would show up. You can find a list of words from http://scenari-platform.org/svn/dev-core/trunk/Lib_XulRunner/mac/dictionaries/en-US.dic. Somehow, this kid has managed to get all those words in as tags or YouTube’s new closed caption which YouTube also uses for displaying search result. Try it out, for example search for “Admiralty” and “Marzipan”.

Hopefully YouTube will fix this before everyone will spam their search!

One Response to 'YouTube Hacked?'

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  1. on November 6th, 2011 at 12:55 am

    Hi there! I just wanted to ask if you ever have any trouble with hackers? My last blog (wordpress) was hacked and I ended up losing many months of hard work due to no data backup. Do you have any solutions to prevent hackers?

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