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.

Comments

And

[ArchieBunker]

Nothing of value was lost.

Re: And

[belthize]

To be fair that may just be one guy who's really obsessed with the video.

If I'm being honest...

[blind biker]

Several songs from DJ Snake, Drake, Katy Perry, Selena Gomez, Shakira, and Taylor Swift have also been either deleted

Part of me is not exactly outraged. I'm thinking humanity might get ahead for a moment if the flux of stupid is interrupted.

Re:If I'm being honest...

[GuB-42]

Every time popular music is involved there is always that guy who has to make a comment like that.
Probably the same guy who comments on the "poor choice" of music at parties instead of just having fun.

Popular music is popular for a reason guys. It is not meant to be refined, it is meant to make people happy, and it works. Respect that. Yes it is stupid, partying is stupid, having some mindless fun is stupid, but that's the kind of stupid that makes the world a better place.

Re:If I'm being honest...

[belthize]

Nah, I think it's just because this particular new generation has shit taste in music vs my generation, oddly enough the generation previous to mine also had shit taste in music.

Re:If I'm being honest...

[lucm]

Every time popular music is involved there is always that guy who has to make a comment like that.
Probably the same guy who comments on the "poor choice" of music at parties instead of just having fun.

As far as I'm concerned, real music died when heathens turned away from gregorian chants and started to use harmonies and chords. Once that line was crossed, the gates of Hell opened and now we have fat girls with no musical talent on the youtubes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

^ This is not what God intended when he gave us the blessed diatonic scale. REPENT, PEOPLE

Re:If I'm being honest...

[blind biker]

Every time popular music is involved there is always that guy who has to make a comment like that.

And everytime there is someone pooping on pop music, there is that guy who is karmawhoring with exactly these words.

Re:If I'm being honest...

[Opportunist]

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!

Re:If I'm being honest...

[KozmoStevnNaut]

Popular music is popular because it is popular.

I'll back up a bit. Popular music is written specifically to appeal to the lowest common denominator, a simple rhythm that resonates with most people in a given region or culture, on a basic level. There are a lot of well-known tricks you can use, including a "heartbeat" rhythm, a straight-forward happy-sounding refrain that is easy to sing along to, a repeated refrain at end of the song with the final repetition a half tone up, there's a whole recipe for making pop music with a reasonable chance at success.

Obviously, taste is fickle and ever-changing, so you also need a hell of a lot of luck to make a popular hit. The big labels use their influence to push their chosen "hit potentials" to radio stations, streaming playlists (including club music services), TV shows, DJs, all over the place. When people hear a song over and over, it creates associations, and they'll be more apt to put on that song, or request it at parties. It's a cumulative effect.

This is not intended to put down pop music, a lot of it is extremely well-written for its purpose and produced in an extremely slick, ear-friendly fashion. I don't think anyone can honestly ignore the talent of someone like George Michael, no matter how much they prefer other genres.

Popular != good, but it's also != automatically shit.

Funny

[cascadingstylesheet]

Funny, you forgot to quote this:

The hackers, calling themselves Prosox and Kuroi'sh, had written "Free Palestine" underneath the videos.

Re:Funny

[drinkypoo]

Funny, you forgot to quote[...]

It's quite astonishing what some people will do to prevent anyone hearing their story.

Re:Funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, you forgot to quote[...]

It's quite astonishing what some people will do to prevent anyone hearing their story.

Like ... by publishing their "story" in the Washington Post? Yeah, what a coverup! :)

The coverup is shooting someone who is clearly identified as a journalist. Israel does this kind of thing all the time. Hell, when an Israeli soldier was caught on video shooting a wounded and detained Palestinian in the head and was sentenced to a year in prison there were protests because the sentence was too harsh!

Re:Funny

[tinkerton]

That is mildly ironic because in general any mention of 'Palestine' is considered reason enough to delete a video. Or a twitter or facebook account.

Re:Funny

[drinkypoo]

Dial down your off-topic antisemitic propaganda. The guy wasn't killed to prevent people from hearing a story, he was killed because he was in the middle of a violent riot.

Being opposed to the deliberate murder of journalists is not antisemitic. Being opposed to the silencing of the people of Palestine is not antisemitic. Pointing out that the nation of Israel is using many of the tactics of Nazi Germany is not antisemitic. Pointing out that Slashdot buried probably the most important fact of the story is not antisemitic.

If and when I start ranting about how "the Jews" are doing this or that, start pointing your accusatory finger. If I start frothing about how "the Zionist Conspiracy" is running Hollywood, you can point and laugh.

My views on the subject are summed up in this informative documentary.

Security hack or auto-removals due to DMCA?

[houghi]

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.

wrong girl?

[DrYak]

I find your concept that there could be "a wrong girl" intriguing.

whatever floats your boat, dude.

Probably hacked the record label, not YouTube.

[pikine]

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 must be missing something

[k6mfw]

Examples cited in summary seems to me we're not missing much but maybe that's me as I'm not familiar with many of these names. I think there are plenty other options to get videos of today's major stars. It is the older ones (i.e. Connie Francis, Julie London) no longer on the Top 40 list (if there is such a thing these days) that would be a shame if that footage becomes lost.

Besides music there are many other interesting videos like techie stuff on how to implement various stuff, interesting documentary clips no longer shown on television both OTA and CATV. If this stuff goes, then it's back to old days of swapping VHS tapes.