YouTube Taken Down by DDos – Was it Ghost Squad Hackers (GSH)?
The YouTube streaming service had a downtime of one to two hours during Wednesday evening US time. Millions of people around the globe weren’t able to stream videos on the service because of the disruption. These many countries and more include The United States, Europe, South American, and the Asia Pacific.
A group of hacktivists known as “Ghost Squad Hackers” (GSH) claims to be responsible for the downtime caused on the Google-owned Youtube servers. GSH Tweeted that they were responsible for the disruption on Twitter Wednesday morning, self-boasting about it, but without giving valid proof of their claim.
Youtube downed by Ghost Squad Hackers. #GSH #GhostSquadHackers #YouTubeDown #DownedbyGSH
— ~#GhostSquadHackers (@GhostSquadHack) October 17, 2018
So far Google has kept their mouth shut regarding the cause of the disruption. YouTube has since been restored and is up and running; YouTube tweeted that the issue has been resolved.
It is important to notify our readers that GSH has a history of cyber attacks, including the CNN servers in previous operations. They are also known to have defaced numerous Afghan websites during 2016. These defaces included the Bank of Israel and the website owned by the Israeli Prime Minister.
Their preferred tactics are to perform distributed denial of service attacks, or DDos. It has been suggested by security analysts that these same cyber warfare tactics could have been used by them to disrupt YouTube on Wednesday.
Some twitter users had reports of services such as YouTube, YouTube Music, and YouTube TV being down for nearly two hours on Wednesday. They say the homepage of YouTube was either displaying no videos, or showed a network error when accessed with the mobile. It also affected computer users.
However, it may have been ICANN according to ICANN.org. Here is the start of the ICANN statement:
LOS ANGELES – 15 October 2018 – The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has determined that the first-ever changing of the cryptographic key that helps protect the Domain Name System (DNS) has been completed with minimal disruption of the global Internet. It was the first time the key has been changed since it was first put in use in 2010.
