How to properly secure your YouTube account: Following the recent breaches on youtube, we have decided to put together a comprehensive list of steps you should take towards properly securing your YouTube account and by extension, your Google accounts too.

Now Read: Linus Tech Tips hacked

Recently, possibly the biggest tech YouTube Channel, Linus tech tips, was compromised to promote a deep fake crypto scam. All of Linus’s videos were deleted during the process and we’re sure it was a very distressing time. We’re here to help guide you through properly securing your YouTube account, so the likelihood of this happening to you is reduced to its minimum.

How to Secure your YouTube account

Securing your YouTube account is easy and it should be done to the highest possible degree with any account you own. There are Four major steps to making sure your YouTube account is secure.

First up, is to obviously make an account, or log into your existing one.

Set up 2-factor authentication

2-factor authentication, or 2FA, is a second layer of security that helps you protect your account from bad actors (hackers) should your account information be compromised. As of right now, Google offers 2 methods of 2FA and that’s mobile and authenticator.

Mobile can either send you an SMS text with a code to input after you’ve entered your login details, or it can send a prompt to the mobile device that’s connected to your Google account. The SMS way is a tad more secure physically.

The Authenticator route is Google can connect your YouTube account to the Google Authenticator, which generates a unique code every 10 or-so seconds to keep things secure. 2 factor-authentication is essential for good account security.

All this can be done at myaccount.google.com/security

Set and check channel-level permissions

YouTube has a very handy feature that allows you as the channel owner to assign a role or certain permissions to other google accounts, whether this be admin, viewer, or manager. This enables you to allow restricted access without giving anyone the keys to your whole account.

If you’re going to need some help running your YouTube account, do not give away your YouTube account details, or any account details for that matter, to anyone, regardless.

Use the channel-level permissions to grant others access based on their role, and it goes without saying, only grant access of any kind to people you know are authentic.

Regularly check your channel-level permissions to make sure everyone who should have access has the correct access, and anyone who shouldn’t be there is promptly removed.

This can be done in the Settings/permissions sections within your YouTube account.

Set a strong password

We hope it goes without saying that you should set as strong a password as possible for any account you own. But what makes a strong password?

There are a few ways to make sure your password is strong, here are the three rules every password should follow:

Passwords should be more than 8 characters long.
Use a combination of upper and lower-case letters, symbols, numbers, and special characters.
Never use common words, letter or number patterns, or anything personal to you.

Having a strong password makes it harder for hackers to guess, and it also makes it harder to brute-force using wordlists. Passwords like “password1234”, or your birthday are unacceptable.

Use a password manager

If all this seems too much or you don’t think you can remember a password of that magnitude, Google has an inbuilt “Suggested password” feature that pops up most of the time when creating a password. This is then stored securely on your Google account hassle-free.

If you don’t fancy Google’s way, there are a number of password managers out there that do a fantastic job, one of the ones that we recommend is 1password, although you have to pay a small subscription fee.

Be aware of potential scams

Scams are a big part of the dark side of the internet, there are many forms of scams that vary from phone scams to email scams. Protecting yourself against scams can be difficult, especially since the ways in which hackers aim to scam become more complex and believable by the day.

There are a few basic ways to detect an email scam, we chose to focus on email scams as they are the most common type of cam that results in account compromises.

Should YouTube contact you (or Google about YouTube) correspondence will ONLY come from @google.com or @youtube.com email addresses. ANY other variance, domain extension, or spelling is not an official Google source and should be avoided.

An easy way to spot a scam email is to look for spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, official emails go through various stages of proofreading before they get sent out to the masses, so it’s unlikely to have common mistakes within them.

Google nor YouTube will ever ask you to reveal any account details over email. nor will they send you any attachments and ask you to open them. YouTube and Google will send you links, however, so it’s a good idea to check the links are what they say that they are, and not a phishing scam.

what is a Phishing scam?

Briefly, a Phishing scam is where a hacker will create a web page, form, or some kind of document to look official and send it to thousands of people over a mass email. This email can be titled anything, and it can be formatted in any way, but it will usually be trying to direct you to a login page.

Do not enter your login details if you get to a login page from a link in an email. It’s almost always a scam, if you’re unsure, just navigate to the official login page for YouTube and sign in via that, never through a link in an email. That’s How to properly secure your YouTube account.

How to protect your YouTube account from hackers?

Following the above steps is the best way to protect your YouTube account from hackers. As long as you refrain from sharing your login info, grant the correct permissions to other accounts that might manage your account, and have a solid 2FA method enabled. That’s all you really can do.

Of course, there are ways and means around all of these safety features, but if you’re a small channel it is unlikely anyone would go through the effort to circumvent these safety features to gain access to your account.

What are some recently hacked YouTube channels?

Unfortunately, there has been a few YouTube channels hacked within the last few months. The most recent of which was Linus Tech Tips. LTT has over 15 Million subscribers on the platform and was recently hacked via a PDF file containing malware that stole an active session token from a web browser.

Whilst this sounds scary, the attack would have been stopped by step 4, not messing with suspicious emails, but mistakes were made and the channel was hacked to promote a crypto scam. Thankfully, 24 hours later, everything returned to normal, but not before a large portion of the channel’s videos was deleted.

Linus has called upon Google to change the way that Google deals with security breaches, and offer more features to help further boost account security.

What do I do if my YouTube channel is hacked?

First of all, don’t panic. What is done can be undone.

The first thing you’re going to want to do is to change your password and force a refresh of both sessions and session tokens. Then you should Email YouTube support and make them aware of the hack.

If you haven’t already, set up 2FA and make sure it’s functioning properly.

If your account is being streamed on by a bad actor, revoke and change the stream keys to take down the streams quickly.

The next thing you want to do has nothing to do with YouTube, you want to navigate to passwords.google.com and do the password checker. This will force Google to check all of your passwords to determine if you have been part of a breach.

If google returns some compromised passwords, stop what you are doing and reset those passwords immediately. it’s always best to change your bank login and any other important areas that may contain money or sensitive information.

Final word

Getting hacked is possibly the worst feeling in the world, but it can happen to anyone. If you follow all of these steps, you can minimize the chances of you getting hacked and keep your YouTube account safe and secure for hopefully, a lifetime. We hope you have now learned how to properly secure your YouTube account.

How to properly secure your YouTube account

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