The YouTube accounts belonging to world-famous celebrities were hacked by an unknown hacker
A number of A-list artistes suffered a cyberattack that targeted their YouTube accounts. The channels that were affected include those belonging to Justin Bieber, Drake and Eminem in a cyber incident that took Twitter by storm.
To understand the significance of the cyberattack, we need to remember that the three celebrities boast a collective online following of 146 million subscribers. The hacking incident also targeted the accounts belonging to Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Harry Styles, Kanye West, Travis Scott, The Weekend, Lil Nas X and Michael Jackson.
An article by the Daily Mail reported that one of the videos that had been uploaded to the YouTube channels was titled “Justin Biener – Free Paco Sanz (ft Will Smith, Chris Rock, Skinny flex & Los Pelaos).
It turns out that Paco Sanz is a Spanish prisoner that was sent behind bars after the courts founds out that he had engaged in fraud activities that involved him pretending that he suffered a terminal illness.
The video that was posted to Justin Bieber’s hacked account showed Sanz holding a guitar the wrong way whilst singing in Spanish. This was well captured in screen recordings shared on Twitter by users such as this one (See below)
Figure 1: A Twitter user shared the screen recording of the video posted to Justin Bieber’s hacked YouTube account.
Vevo Acted Swiftly
While YouTube seems to have avoided a PR disaster by responding to the hacking claims, it turns out that Vevo acknowledged the cyberattack and revealed its plans to review the status of their security systems.
As reported by The New York Post, a Vevo representative intimated that they noted that some video were directly uploaded to a number of Vevo artiste channels by an unauthorized source.
Vevo acted swiftly by deleting the videos and putting in mechanisms to ensure that the threat actor was not able to access preexisting content on the targeted channels. Therefore, the firm managed to secure the channels and resolve the problem.
Well, this is not the first time that celebrity online accounts have come under hacker attack considering the prevalence of crypto scams leveraging on the image of global figures like Elon Musk.
