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Despite earlier reports that YouTube had been hacked, that is not the case. Vevo was!
On Tuesday morning people started noticing there favorite videos including Luis Fonsi’s ‘Despacito’ had been taken down. Topping charts to become the world’s most watched video with over 5 billion views on YouTube, viewers were shocked to find the video replaced with messages from hackers before they were eventually taken offline while Vevo investigated.
The clip's cover image was replaced with a photo showing a group of people wearing masks and wielding guns from a Netflix show called ‘Casa de Papel.’
The hackers calling themselves Prosox and Kuroi'sh had replaced some of the videos' titles with messages including a call to ‘free Palestine.’
A Twitter account that allegedly belonged to one of the hackers stated that it was all done for fun.
‘’It's just for fun, I just use [the] script 'youtube-change-title-video' and I write 'hacked'.
"Don't judge me I love YouTube," the tweet read.
Despacito was not the only unique case. Other popular songs that were defaced include Chris Brown, Shakira, DJ Snake, Selena Gomez, Drake, Katy Perry and Taylor Swift. However, some of those videos are still available but with defaced titles and thumbnail images.
‘’Vevo can confirm that a number of videos in its catalogue were subject to a security breach today, which has now been contained. We are working to reinstate all videos affected and our catalogue to be restored to full working order. We are continuing to investigate the source of the breach.’’ A Vevo representative told Polygon.
‘’After seeing unusual upload activity on a handful of VEVO channels, we worked quickly with our partner to disable access while they investigate the issue.” A YouTube representative told Polygon in a statement.
According to the news site, Vevo is specifically run by administrators who upload videos to the website and the Vevo YouTube channel. That means people who have access to Vevo’s platform, which is syndicated on YouTube, may not have access to the rest of YouTube overall. All of the videos involved in this hack were uploaded to Vevo’s servers.
This is not the first time Vevo has been subjected to hacking. In September 2017 their security was breached and 3.12TB worth of internal files were leaked online.
