‘Despacito,’ the song that won’t go away, briefly did — from YouTube
Music videos for “Despacito” and a wave of other popular songs were hacked on YouTube, with the online perpetrators altering song titles and images while wreaking other havoc.
The video for “Despacito” — which, at over 5 billion views, is the mostwatched upload in YouTube history — was briefly deleted from YouTube, but only after someone changed the lead photo for the Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee hit to a picture of hooded figurines pointing guns at the camera.
Drake, Taylor Swift, Chris Brown, Selena Gomez, Post Malone and Shakira are among the other artists who had videos fall victim to the hack. Every video affected Tuesday morning was originally posted by the musicsharing company Vevo.
“Vevo can confirm that a number of videos in its catalogue were subject to a security breach today, which has now been contained,” a representative for Vevo said in a statement to the Daily News. “We are working to reinstate all videos affected and our catalog to be restored to full working order.
“We are continuing to investigate the source of the breach.”
The videos themselves did not appear to be changed in any way, but the hackers — who went by Prosox and Kuroi’sh in their posts — wrote their names under several videos.
A Twitter user named @ProsoxW3b also claimed to be one of the hackers, tweeting, “It’s just for fun i just use script ‘youtube-change-title-video’ and I write ‘hacked’ don t judge me i love youtube” (sic).
In addition to the changes made on YouTube, several affected videos also featured the names of the hackers on the Vevo website.