Security Issue-Did you have a YouTube Acct. before 2006?

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5-Jan-2015 5:34pm
This is not strictly speaking "tax" related, but I am posting this because it might help someone else. Last week, I started getting google security alerts (someone tried to access your account) for a non-Google email address. At first I thought it was a phishing effort, but I went through Google's confirmation process and it was legit. I couldn't figure out why Google would be sending security alerts on an old, old yahoo account. It turns out that when Google bought YouTube, they turned all the old YouTube sign in accounts (mine was from 2004 or so) into Google accounts. Since many of our old passwords are out there, someone is exploiting this. This can be especially dangerous if the old yahoo account was used as a recovery email for something else. It also allows someone to impersonate you using a Gmail account.

So if you get a Google security alet for a non Google account, don't ignore it. Apparently, this is happenning for Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, Verizon and MSN accounts. Anything you might have used in the early 2000's.

Update: A friend in tech looked into this a bit. It turns out this is a known issue that has been around for at least two years. People in Russia and VietNam are exploiting these old accounts to distribute porn on YouTube. Google's official position is that they do not open accounts without sending verification to the account email address. However, in previous discussions online, there have been hints that, since verification must have been sent when the YouTube account was originally opened (back in the 90's), a second verification was not required at the time the account was converted to a Google account. The end result is that a lot of folks wound up with a Google account that they didn't know they had. They user name on the account is the email address you used to set up a YouTube account before YouTube was owned by Google. The account holder may have changed the password on the email account, but they probably never changed it on the associated Google accont because they didn't know the account existed. The end result is that these Google accounts can be easily hijacked using ancient passwords that have been obtained from prevous hacks. Going back to the late 90's, pretty much all of the affectd services (AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, MSN and others) have been hacked at one time or another. These old passwords are readily available.

I was one of the lucky ones. I responded to the Google Security alert, got help from a friend, accessed the old account and shut it down. Others (178+ in a two month period on one thread) first learned of this problem when they received a notice that their YouTube account had been frozen because they were distributing violent porn. At that point----since the bad guys changed passwords, created bogus recovery email addresses etc.---the vicitims could not even shut down the account. The fact that the account is frozen for YouTube does not mean it cannot be used for other purposes.

Google does not appear to be helping because their official positon is that this is not happening-----the victim must have received a verification email, ignored or approved it, and then had their Google account hacked elsewhere. That fact that hundreds of folks are having this problem doesn't seem to matter.
 

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