YouTube is the most powerful social network for video streaming. The YouTube platform itself is highly secure and maintains advanced protection and safety measures to protect its visitors.
However, due to its popularity and trustworthiness as a service powered by Google, hackers tend to exploit YouTube videos to spread suspicious links to infect visitors’ devices or steal their sensitive information. Thus, although YouTube tends to be highly secure, the experience of watching YouTube videos is not entirely safe.
Can you get hacked by watching a YouTube video?
You are very unlikely to get hacked by just watching a video on YouTube, assuming you are using the REAL YouTube site or application, and you avoid clicking on suspicious links inside the video description or comments.
Security of YouTube Videos
Both the YouTube website and mobile application are extremely safe to be visited, they use HTTPS protocol to secure all communications between their web servers and users’ devices.
Unlike insecure HTTP links, HTTPS protocol uses digital encryption methods to protect the data being exchanged. This guarantees the videos that users are watching are being streamed to their devices exactly as they were produced by YouTube algorithms.
At the same time, YouTube resorts to its own encoding and analysis mechanisms to produce its videos when uploaded by the publishers. These techniques are powerful enough to detect hidden malicious scripts and omit them.
That being said, the only possible way to manipulate a YouTube video is to “hack” the YouTube platform. By accessing its servers and modifying its algorithms, which tends to be extremely unexpected to happen.
Avoid Infected Links in Video Description and Comments
As a user-generated content platform, anyone can publish a video to YouTube or comment on an existing one. Although all content is automatically inspected, hackers are still able to spread suspicious links inside the video description or comment sections.
This way, attackers trick users to click on such infected links. For instance, on the promise that these links will provide added value to the video content or cover additional points the video missed.
Clicking on infected links might expose the audience to various threats, while there are many indicators that help us inspect any link on YouTube before clicking on it.
Additionally, some scamming YouTubers tend to intrigue their audience by encouraging them to follow fraudulent links or websites by just mentioning them in their videos.
Be Aware of Fake YouTube Replicas
Hackers can also resort to replicating the YouTube site design so that visitors won’t be able to figure out they are not on the real YouTube website. These websites might have similar URLs to YouTube with some barely noticeable modifications.
These websites tend to be identical to YouTube while their content is being served from other fake servers. Such websites are highly dangerous and can be usually identified by double-checking the YouTube domain name in the browser’s URL box.