CYBERSPACE—Everything is back to normal following Sesame Street’s 20 minutes from hell Sunday, when the program’s YouTube channel was hacked by someone who clearly doesn’t like kids. Visitors to the site were confronted with x-rated videos rather than the Muppets during that time period. Immediate complaints to YouTube resulted in the quick suspension of the channel for “repeated or severe violations of our Community Guidelines.”
A message on the page now reads, “We apologize for any inconvenience our audience may have experienced Sunday on our Sesame Street YouTube channel. Our channel was temporarily compromised, but we have since restored our original line-up of the best classic Sesame Street video clips featuring Cookie Monster, Big Bird, Grover, Oscar the Grouch, and the rest of the fuzzy, feathered, and googly-eyed friends you remember from childhood.”
Indeed, as of early Wednesday afternoon the lead video currently features three Muppets singing “Change the World,” a far cry from the very explicit video viewable Sunday, or the links that led people to an adult film titled First Anal Quest: Angelica. Immediately following the discovery of the hack and the initial suspension, Sesame Street removed the entire channel, washed its mouth out with soap and then, when it was deemed safe to do so, returned it to prime time.
At first, it was thought that a YouTube user with the handle "MrEdxwx” might have been responsible, since his name appeared on the hacked page, but he posted a quick video denial to his own site.
"I did not hack Sesame Street. I am an honest YouTuber," he insisted. "I work hard to make quality gameplay videos, and most important I respect the community guidelines.
The spotlight has since shifted to persons unknown. According to Fox News, Ira Victor, a director of the digital forensics practice with Data Clone Labs and a member of the High Technology Crime Investigation Association, said, "It most probably was a prank—but what prankster would think it's okay to expose children to this? That's pretty horrifying.”
Victor hypothesized that a security breach of a PBS server earlier in the year, during which “scores of PBS user names and passwords were exposed on the Internet” may have provided the hackers with the information they needed to commit Sunday’s hack
"It could have been that the attacker was able to obtain the username and password for a producer at Sesame Street," Victor told Fox News.
This much we have to believe: it wasn’t anyone from the adult entertainment industry. And if it was, and they are ever identified, there will be serious hell to pay. No word at this time whether law enforcement plane to investigate the incident.
Photo: Screen shot of the hacked site before it was taken down by Sesame Street
