In a recent cyberattack, the official YouTube channel of comedian Tanmay Bhat was hacked. The account, with over 4.4 million subscribers, was renamed as the 'Tesla Corp'. The comedian has posted a tweet saying that his YouTube and Gmail accounts have been hacked and the two-factor authentication breached. He tagged YouTube in his tweet seeking urgent help. Additionally, the hackers have also deleted videos listed on his YouTube channel.
"@YouTube @Google @YouTubeIndia hi guys - my YouTube / gmail account has been hacked. 2FA by passed. Need help urgently. Pls DM!" the stand-up comedian tweeted.
Tanmay became latest victim of the cyber-attack that has targeted a number of other users, like comedian-YouTuber Aishwarya Mohanraj and Abdu Rozik. Aishwarya's channel which has more than 70,000 subscribers features Tesla's picture with 2 live streams of a Tesla event. She also tweeted that her Gmail account has been compromised and she has lost access to her YouTube account. "@TeamYouTube, hello my gmail account has been hacked and I have lost access to my YouTube channel as well can you pls help?" Aishwarya wrote.
Furthermore, they have even replaced the cover photos of the YouTube channels with images of Tesla cars. All these YouTube accounts are still not recovered. While on some accounts the videos have been completely deleted, Tanmay's channel still features 473 videos, but all of them are listed as private.
Given Elon Musk's online popularity, hackers have impersonated him in the past to perpetrate various types of scams. Even posing as a business account of Musk-owned Tesla isn't entirely new. The live streams being run by these hackers carry superimposed messages that aggressively nudge users to scan a QR code on the screen.
Abdu, who has over 1 million subscribers on YouTube also faced the attack from hackers. His channel too has been flooded with videos of tutorials on crack softwares.
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