In a recent cyberattack, the official YouTube channel of comedian Tanmay Bhatt was hacked. The account, with over 44 lakh subscribers, has now been renamed as the “Tesla Corp”. Additionally, the hackers have also deleted videos listed on his YouTube channel.
Tanmay Bhatt revealed through a tweet that both his YouTube and Gmail accounts had been hacked. He further explained that hackers even breached the two-factor authentication. Seeking assistance from Google and YouTube, Bhatt wrote in a tweet, “Hi guys – my YouTube/Gmail account has been hacked. 2FA bypassed. I need urgent help. Please DM!”
Sharing more details, Bhatt urged YouTube to take swift action and also revealed that the hackers had initiated a livestream video on his YouTube channel, which is now set as a private video. He tweeted, “@TeamYouTube, my channel is hacked and a live stream has begun. Please help!”
Bhatt has revealed that not only were hackers able to take over his account, but they also managed to bypass the two-factor authentication he had set up for security.
It has been reported that many other prominent YouTubers, including stand-up comedian Aishwarya Mohanraj and YouTuber Abdu Rozik, have also fallen victim to similar hacking incidents. In all the compromised accounts, the hackers have changed the names of the YouTube channels to Tesla and replaced the display pictures with Tesla’s logo. Furthermore, they have even replaced the cover photos of the YouTube channels with images of Tesla cars.
Other than changing the profile name and picture, the hackers even started to live streaming through these YouTube accounts with the title: “Tesla Unveils the All-New Model S Plaid 2024 Today! Live Coverage with Elon Musk!”
All these YouTube accounts are still not recovered. While on some accounts the videos have been completely deleted, Bhatt’s channel still features 473 videos, but all of them are listed as private.
In the meantime, journalist Barkha Dutt’s YouTube channel, named “Mojo Story,” was also hacked, and all the videos were deleted from the account.
“After hours of urging @TeamYouTube to act and being assured action is being taken, I woke up to find the @themojostory channel content ALL DELETED by the hackers – four years of blood, toil, sweat, tears, 11 thousand videos, COVID work of 3 years, ALL GONE. I am heartbroken,” tweeted the journalist.
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