Source: New York Post
Reports from this week suggested hacking of the YouTube accounts of some of the well known faces in the music industry. The accounts were supposedly hacked by an “unauthorised source,” who went on to upload numerous odd clips of a convicted swindler. The celebrities among those who the hacker hit were The Weeknd, Taylor Swift, Eminem, Harry Styles, Drake, Justin Bieber, Lil Nas X and Michael Jackson. With Bieber alone having 68.2 million subscribers, the combined total of all their subscribers on the platform comes to about hundreds of millions.
On Tuesday, April 5, an account on Twitter named ‘Los Pelaos’ announced that they had hacked Travis Scott at 3:37am. They posted “We just hacked Travis Scott” in Spanish on the social media platform.
The hacker posted a video on Bieber’s YouTube channel initially. The video was titled “Justin Bieber- Free Paco Sanz (ft. Will Smith, Chris Rock, Skinny flex & Los Pelaos)”.
The purpose of the video posted:
The Spanish conman Paco Sanz was sentenced to prison for two years a few months back. The sentence was for committing fraud post lying about suffering from terminal cancer, along with defrauding large sums of money from 2010 to 2017. The video uploaded featured Sanz holding a guitar the incorrect way while singing along to a song. The song was Spanish trap one remixed by La Mafia Del Edit, a meme page on the social media platform Instagram. The account notably defended Sanz back in February at the time when he was convicted of fraud.
On the other hand, the account of twitter named ‘@lospeloaosbro’ went on to announce the series of artists they were hacking simultaneously. They were even occasionally pausing to ask a question on the page- “who next?” to their 14,900 followers. Moreover, they even offered to sell security to the celebrities who did not wish to be a victim of such hacking. Unfortunately, the identity of the user of the handle is still a mystery. However, the display picture of the account looks like to be that of Sanz along with a nasal cannula. The videos were subsequently removed from the platform following the rack up of views which were thousand in numbers.
YouTube is yet to react or give in a statement for the incident. On the other had, Vevo specified how they were reviewing their security systems for how these videos were uploaded by an ‘unauthorised source. A representative of the Hackervideo hosting service mentioned how the artists targeted were safe with the incident resolved. However, they would still conduct a detailed review of their systems.
YouTube has been visibly fending off hackers post a recent series of attacks towards high profile content creators on the platform, posting cryptocurrency scams and auctioning off access to the accounts. Owing to these, YouTube has made the enabling of two-step verification a requirement of popular accounts.
