Vevo Hack Sees YouTube Music Videos for High-Profile Artists Replaced | #youtubescams | #lovescams | #datingscams

Video hosting service Vevo suffered an embarrassing hack yesterday which saw the YouTube videos of high-profile artists replaced with clips of a Spanish conman.

As The Verge reports(Opens in a new window), the incident has been acknowledged by Vevo, which stated, “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 forthcoming as to how it happened.

The hack was apparently carried out by the criminal group Los Pelaos, with the replaced videos pointing to the group’s Twitter account @lospelaosbro(Opens in a new window).

The affected YouTube channels included Ariana Grande, Drake, Eminem, Harry Styles, Kanye West, Lil Nas X, Michael Jackson, Taylor Swift, and The Weeknd, to name but a few of the more high-profile artists. Instead of their expected music videos, viewers were presented with clips of a Spanish conman who had been convicted for fraud for lying about having terminal cancer. The man in question is 50-year-old Paco Sanz(Opens in a new window), who appeared on TV and social media between 2010-2017 claiming he had over 2,000 tumors from Cowden syndrome.

Vevo managed to take the videos down, secure the artist accounts, and confirmed none of the original videos had been lost in the hack. Even so, it raises questions as to the security of Vevo’s network.

This isn’t the first time Vevo has suffered a security breach. Back in 2017, over 3TB of data was stolen from Vevo’s internal systems courtesy of an Okta login acquired through a phishing scam. Then in 2018, some of Vevo’s music videos were defaced or replaced(Opens in a new window), which sounds very much like yesterday’s hack.