Vevo to ‘review’ shield after YouTube feeds for Lil Nas X, Justin Bieber hacked

YouTube channels for some of the world’s most significant stars showered fans with weird music videos. Vevo channels for artists such as Lil Nas X, Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Harry Styles, Eminem, Drake, The Weeknd, Michael Jackson, Kanye West, and many others were affected.

The channels in query have subscriber counts that add hundreds of millions. Before the videos vanished, viewers saw bizarre clips of Paco Sanz, a Spanish conman penalized to two years in jail after being condemned for fraud for fibbing regarding having terminal cancer, and rapper Lil Tjay.

YouTube did not respond to demands for comment; however, Vevo — which bills itself as “the world’s leading music video network” — did recognize the incident.

A spokesperson reacted to contact through Vevo’s public press information and requested not to be named, mentioning the “nature” of the incident. However, they stated that “Some videos were directly uploaded to a small number of Vevo artist channels before today by an unauthorized source.”

Besides noting that the videos are headed, they also asserted, “No pre-existing content was accessible to the source. While the artist channels have been secured and the incident has been resolved, as a best practice, Vevo will be conducting a review of our security systems.”

Another Vevo-related violation in 2018 saw popular music videos defaced, while the then-most-viewed YouTube video of all time, “Despacito” (it is now second, after “Baby Shark”), was vandalized and shortly removed.

Google and YouTube have just focused on trying to secure popular channels. Last year, a report emphasized a phishing campaign targeting creators. As a result, YouTube needed millions of popular media to enable two-step verification. In addition, Google states it gave away hardware authentication keys to over 10,000 high-risk users.

Despite those safeguards, an evident compromise somewhere along Vevo’s pipeline allowed the attacker, who suggested their Twitter handle @lospelaosbro in the posts, to resume uploading across high-profile channels for many hours.

The artists or the individuals who operate their pages were likely incapable of doing anything about the issue. Vevo’s artist information page demonstrates that it works by building a separate verified Artist Channel to upload videos.

YouTube merges that content with videos on the artist’s own YouTube page. A support page declares that “Vevo does not provide access directly to artists.” Instead, autonomous content providers or the artist’s music label will upload the content to Vevo, dispatching it to YouTube and other channels.