The YouTube channels of multimedia website Mojo Story and comedian Tanmay Bhat were on Monday hacked and all of their content was deleted.
But by Monday evening, Mojo Story’s channel was restored and its videos were back online. However, the profile photo and the name of Bhat’s channel have been changed to Tesla, an American company. All the videos on Bhat’s channel have been deleted.
In the early hours of Monday, the comedian said that his YouTube and Gmail accounts were hacked after the two-factor authentication for them was bypassed.
Earlier in the day, Mojo Story’s profile photo and name had also been changed to that of Tesla.
Barkha Dutt, who is also the website’s editor, said that her team was assured of action by YouTube.
“I woke up to find Mojo Story 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,” she wrote in a tweet, tagging YouTube Chief Executive Officer Neal Mohan.
Dutt said that her team had repeatedly urged YouTube to freeze their channel in order to protect its content from the hackers.
“But we kept being told “process of investigation has to be followed – and now its gone,” she said. “I feel someone took a knife through my heart is all I can say. This could have been stopped.”
In 2021, Mojo Story was named the winners of the South Asian Digital Media Awards for its coverage of the coronavirus pandemic in India.
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