YouTube’s most watched video ever, Despacito, disappears thanks to Vevo hack
The video for hit song Despacito, the most-watched video on the site, was among those affected.
Music video service Vevo has confirmed its YouTube page suffered a security breach, after some of the video-sharing site’s most popular videos were doctored by hackers.
The video for hit song Despacito, which is the most-watched video on the site with more than five billion views, was among several that were deleted or had their title and cover image altered to reference the intruders.
Vevo is a joint venture between three of the music industry’s biggest record labels, Universal, Sony and Warner, with music videos by its artists syndicated on YouTube.
Videos by Taylor Swift, Drake and Selena Gomez were also among those affected by the breach.
In a statement Vevo said: “Vevo can confirm that a number of videos in its catalogue were subject to a security breach today, which has now been contained.
“We are continuing to investigate the source of the breach.”
YouTube said it had worked with Vevo to secure the affected accounts after “seeing unusual upload activity on a handful of Vevo channels”.
YouTube, which is owned by Google, said its service had not more broadly been affected by the issue.
The hackers, who called themselves Prosox and Kuroi’sh, added their names to some video titles and descriptions, and replaced some video cover photos with an image of masked men holding guns.
A Twitter account claiming to belong to Prosox said: “Its just for fun i just use script ‘youtube-change-title-video’ and i write ‘hacked’ don t judge me i love youtube.”
