YouTube HACKED? Cyber-attack group ‘Ghost Squad’ claims responsibility for today’s outage
A TEAM of hacktivists has claimed responsibility for the outage that brought YouTube down last night.
The Ghost Squad Hackers boasted of its exploits on Twitter, although it so far hasn't provided any proof that it was behind the outage.
YouTube fans in Europe, the US and South America were left twiddling their thumbs last night after the popular video-sharing website went down for over an hour.
The Google-owned company was tight-lipped as to the causes of this outage, on Twitter only that it was "working on resolving" the issue.
Well, one explanation has now been been put forward: the cyber-attack group known as the Ghost Squad Hackers has claimed responsibility for YouTube's momentary disappearance.
"Youtube downed by Ghost Squad Hackers," it this morning via its Twitter account.
Sadly, the hacktivist group provided no further comment on what it claims to have done, and no kind of proof that its claims are true.
Still, it has a well-documented history of attacking big organisations, government agencies, the and , so its boast is at least credible.
In 2016, it a coordinated campaign against CNN and other American media outlets, working in concert with fellow hacktivists Anonymous to launch denial-of-service attacks on news websites.
In the same year, it 12 Afghan government websites, and also websites belonging to the Bank of Israel and the Israeli Prime Minister.
Throughout its short, nearly three-year existence, its preferred tactic has been the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
So assuming that its claims are true, it's reasonable to suggest that this is what took down YouTube last night.
In such an attack, hackers use hundreds of thousands of IP addresses to bombard a website (such as YouTube) with unmanageable levels of traffic.
If the level of traffic is high enough, this will bring the website down, since it will be unable to process all the requests it receives.
What is a Distributed Denial of Service Attack?
A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack uses large numbers of devices to flood a website with internet traffic
The aim of DDoS attacks is to bring a website down and prevent public access to it
In recent years, the rising popularity of smart devices and the internet of things (IoT) has meant that DDoS attacks have grown massively in scale. The number of devices used by hackers can number in the hundreds of thousands, or even millions
DDoS attacks can be hard for websites to prevent, since it's not always straightforward to tell the difference between friendly and unfriendly traffic
The average DDoS attack costs around $2.5 million for the business targeted by it
But assuming that the Ghost Squad Hackers are behind the outage, what's more elusive than the group's methods are its motives.
Its previous attacks have reportedly been driven by political motivations, such as outrage at Afghani opium production, and Israel's treatment of Palestinians.
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However, without providing more detail on its claimed attack of YouTube, it's hard to say why it may have targeted the social media site.
Possibly, its motivations might revolve around perceptions that YouTube unjustly censors videos, with the website limiting sharing of 'controversial' content last year, for example.
YouTube declined to confirm the cause of the outage.
What do you think of Ghost Squad Hackers' claims? Let us know in the comments.
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