Video hosting service Vevo suffered an embarrassing hack yesterday that saw YouTube videos from high-profile artists replaced with clips from a Spanish scammer.
Like The edge pays, the incident was acknowledged by Vevo, which said, “Some videos were directly uploaded to a small number of Vevo artist channels earlier today by an unauthorized source.” So far, no explanation has been given on how it happened.
The hack was apparently carried out by the criminal group Los Pelaos, with the superseded videos pointing to the group’s Twitter account. @lospelaosbro.
Affected YouTube channels included Ariana Grande, Drake, Eminem, Harry Styles, Kanye West, Lil Nas X, Michael Jackson, Taylor Swift and The Weeknd, to name a few of the top artists. Instead of their expected music videos, viewers received clips from a Spanish con artist who had been convicted of fraud for lying about terminal cancer. The man in question is Paco Sanz, 50 years oldwho appeared on TV and social media between 2010 and 2017 claiming he had more than 2,000 Cowden syndrome tumours.
Vevo managed to remove the videos, secure the artists’ accounts, and confirm that none of the original videos were lost in the hack. Even so, it raises questions about the security of Vevo’s network.
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This isn’t the first time Vevo has suffered a security breach. In 2017, more than 3TB of data was stolen from Vevo’s internal systems through an Okta login acquired through a phishing scam. Then in 2018, some of Vevo’s clips were degraded or replacedwhich looks a lot like yesterday’s hack.
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