It’s not all that often we hear of a big hack on any of Google’s major platforms, but today YouTube has seemingly fallen to hackers, at least to a small extent. This morning, quite a lot of high-profile music videos had their titles and thumbnails changed, forcing some artists to go as far as taking the videos down.
Update: Google has confirmed that this was not a hack to YouTube. Rather, this affected VEVO’s platform and has since been contained and affected videos are being fixed. A spokesperson says:
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.
The original story follows:
This morning, many YouTube users noted that titles on some major music videos on the platform, most of which were a part of VEVO, have been altered. The titles mainly have been changed to add “Hacked by Prosox” or “Hacked by Kuroi.” Outside of music videos, others have been affected as well, so it’s unclear if there was a target in mind for this.
One of the biggest stories in all this, though, was the popular video “Despacito.” At the moment, that is the most-viewed video of all time on YouTube, and due to the hacked title and altered thumbnail, the video was simply taken down. Other artists affected include the likes of Selena Gomez, Chris Brown, Taylor Swift, Drake, and many others as The Verge points out.
The purpose or method behind this hack are still unclear, but one of the hackers, Prosox, says on Twitter that it was “just for fun” and was done “using a script.”
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