A Russian coder has revealed how he discovered a way to delete any video on YouTube.
A demonstration of Kamil Hismatullin's technique, posted online, shows that once he had copied part of a video's web address he could use it to wipe the clip within half a minute.Rather than exploit the hack, he instead reported it to parent company Google, which gave him a reward.
He joked, however, that he was tempted to wipe Justin Bieber's music videos.
"I spent six to seven hours [on] research, considering that [for a] couple of hours I've fought the urge to clean up Bieber's channel, haha," wrote Mr Hismatullin.
"Although it was an early Saturday's (sic) morning in San Francisco when I reported [the] issue, Google's security team replied very fast, since this vulnerability could create utter havoc in a matter of minutes in the bad hands.
"This vulnerability [might have been used] to extort people or simply disrupt YouTube by deleting massive amounts of videos in a very short period of time.
"It was fixed in several hours, Google rewarded me $5,000 and luckily no Bieber videos were harmed."
Mr Hismatullin wrote that he discovered the flaw while investigating YouTube Creator Studio, a service that lets video creators see analytics data about the clips they have uploaded via an app.
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