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Porn on Sesame Street? The horror

News
Oct 17, 20112 mins
Data and Information Security

Some jerk hacked Sesame Street’s YouTube channel and put porn there yesterday. Nothing is sacred, apparently.

According to my friend Graham Cluley at Sophos, the porn was flowing on the channel for some 20 minutes before the channel was suspended for “repeated or severe violations of our Community Guidelines.”

“You have to wonder what was going through the mind of whoever hacked Sesame Street’s YouTube page,” Cluley said on the Sophos Naked Security blog.

To me it’s simple. Much has been said and written in recent years about how the dark-side hackers have progressed from childish stunts to serious, money-making crime. But the young punks have never really gone away, and sometimes a stunt is just a stunt.

That said, whoever did this stunt must have been particularly troubled.

That’s the only reason to put this stuff on a channel where the core audience is under the age of 6.

Cluley said the hacker involved also changed the Sesame Street channel profile to this:

WHO DOESN’T LOVE PORN KIDS? RIGHT! EVERYONE LOVES IT! IM MREDXWX AND MY PARTNER MRSUICIDER91 ARE HERE TO BRING YOU MANY NICE CONTENT! PLEASE DON’T LET SESAME STREET TO GET THIS ACCOUNT BACK KIDS 🙁 PLEASE…LET ME AND MRSUICIDER91 HAVE IT AND WE GONNA MAKE ALL THE AMERICA HAPPY!

The lesson at this point is that those who manage the Sesame Street YouTube channel should take another look at the strength of the passwords they choose.

Strong passwords are not always convenient. But if you’re the gatekeeper to a channel for impressionable young minds, you shouldn’t be worried about that anyway.

–Bill Brenner

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