YouTube Hack: Several High-Profile Videos Mysteriously Disappear From Platform, Some Defaced
Several high-profile music videos on YouTube were mysteriously deleted early Tuesday, in what appears like the result of a security compromise. Some of the videos that have been pulled from Google's video platform include Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee's "Despacito" -- which is also the most popular video on the platform. Users reported Tuesday that the thumbnail of the video was replaced by a masked gang holding guns, who identify themselves as "Prosox and Kuroi'sh." Several songs from DJ Snake, Drake, Katy Perry, Selena Gomez, Shakira, and Taylor Swift have also been either deleted or altered with. On Twitter, a person who claims to be one of the hackers, said, "@YouTube Its just for fun i just use script "youtube-change-title-video" and i write "hacked" don t judge me i love youtube." Google has yet to acknowledge the incident. Further reading: BBC.
I would not be surprised if somebody had found a way to abuse the auto-removal of music. Perhaps enough complaints and they even remove those.
We know that Youtube has been blocking movies and sites without reviewing complaints or at least demonitized them. Thsi is how that works:
People put up a video of their own making with their own content. Somebody complaints and the content is (temporarily) demonitized till the maker notices and complaints. It will then be reversed.
The problem is that most videos will make the most money in the beginning. All those subscribers will look at the video and you will not get any money from them.
Then there are the videos that are auto-blocked because somebody send in that it was copyrighted without any proof whatsoever.
Could be either that or they pissed off enough people and now one is pissing back. That would be better news than them being hacked. How could they be hacked? Perhaps there finally was a person who was able to solve the Captcha questions correctly.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Hmm, does that mean that the summary is biased against the Palestinians for suppressing the message or does that mean that the summary is biased for the Palestinians and against the Israelis by not mentioning that the hackers are spreading their message by damaging popular websites 100% unrelated to the conflict in question? Why not both?
The three steps of getting old:
1: The music is great!
2: The music is just not great anymore.
3: The music could be great (because it's all covers of the songs I loved in my youth) but they play it ALL WRONG!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
From the pattern of the damage, those YouTube channels belonging to DJ Snake, Drake, Katy Perry, etc. probably are managed by the same record label marketing person. They probably just hacked into the computer managing these channels while the accounts are still logged in. Everything they did for the damage are something that channel owners could do: changing cover picture, video description, deletion. The actual video content itself hasn't been changed, which is exactly what content creators can't do to their videos, despite it being a popular request.
If they had really hacked YouTube, they may have been able to replace the video if they could pull it off, but since the videos are divided into chunks and aggressively cached by the CDN (as the videos are served over MPEG-DASH), they will probably get very mixed result at best with some chunks from the old video mixed with chunks from the new video.
I once had a signature.