The hijacking of YouTube accounts to promote bogus cryptocurrency schemes is nothing new. At Netcraft, we’ve previously blogged about the scale of cryptocurrency scams, and we saw attacks on at least 2,000 distinct IP addresses every month in the past year. Cryptocurrency-themed attacks remain popular with cybercriminals, but yesterday we had the opportunity to observe the recent high-profile attack on LinusTechTips as it unfolded.

This blog post explains what we saw, and how we protected our users from the scam sites hours before the compromised channels were taken down. All times in this post are GMT.