On Tuesday, April 5, unknown persons hacked a number of YouTube channels belonging to the stars of the world of show business. Among the victims are Justin Bieber, Drake, Eminem, Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Kanye West, Michael Jackson, etc., reports The New York Post.
The attackers uploaded strange videos to many hacked channels, which were then deleted. One of the videos was titled “Justin bieber – Free Paco Sanz (ft. Will Smith, Chris Rock, Skinny flex & Los Pelaos)”.
Paco Sanz is a Spanish criminal who deceived thousands of people by pretending to be terminally ill. Sans is currently in prison. In the published video, he holds a guitar and sings in Spanish.
Another video posted on the YouTube channel of English singer and actor Harry Styles was called “Daddy Yankee – SPEED IS THE BEST HACKED BY @LOSPELAOSBRO ON TWITTER.” It showed a group of men wearing hoodies with the inscription “speed” and dancing to an adapted version of the hit “Hit the Road Jack”.
A Twitter user under the pseudonym @lospelaosbro took responsibility for hacking the “star” YouTube channels and arranged a survey on whom to hack next.
It is not known who @lospelaosbro is, but the photos he published show Paco Sanz. The @lospelaosbro account was created only in April 2022, but 9.7 thousand people have already subscribed to it.
Business Insider described this page as a “shield-posting account”, that is, an account created solely to attract attention by publishing ironic and sarcastic content. Apparently, Chris Rock and Will Smith were mentioned in the title of the video in order to play on the scandal that played out at the recent Academy Awards ceremony.
As information security expert Graham Cluley explained to The Daily Mail, the owners of hacked accounts could use the same third-party service to manage them. If a hacker hacked this service, he was able to publish content on behalf of the stars. The same version is held by ESET’s information security specialist Jake Moore.
“I suspect it was not without the use of shared credentials,” Moore said.
The second version is that the attackers gained access to the account of a YouTube employee, who, in turn, had access to celebrity accounts.
The existence of any vulnerability in YouTube that would allow hacking user channels, IS experts consider unlikely.