Source: Amy Sussman / Getty
You were not alone if you stopped by Vevo pages recently to watch some music videos and experienced some weirdness.
Vevo has acknowledged The Weeknd, Drake, Lil Nas X, Kanye West, Taylor Swift, Eminem, Michael Jackson, Ariana Grande, and other artists’ pages were the victim of an “attack” by someone who goes by the Twitter handle @lospelaosbro. First reported by The Verge, people who visited those pages Wednesday (Apr.6) were greeted by weird clips featuring rapper Lil Tjay and a man named Paco Sanz, who was sent to prison for being a scammer after grifting donations claiming he had cancer.
Vevo confirmed the intrusions to Engadget, telling the website, “some videos were directly uploaded to a small number of Vevo artist channels earlier today by an unauthorized source.” Vevo noted that older content already uploaded was not accessible to the hacker and that it was “conducting a review of our security systems.”
Vevo is owned by Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group, and the company claims it owns “the largest network of music channels on YouTube.” The company, which Google also owns a stake in, functions as a contractor essentially by allowing distributors to merge channels with previous channels converting them into official artists’ channels. The hacked artist channels are owned by multiple labels that Vevo claims have been secured after it resolved the issue.
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Photo: Amy Sussman / Getty
