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By Clare O’Gara
Tue | Sep 24, 2019 | 5:30 AM PDT

Bad news, YouTubers.

A massive number of content creators on YouTube have had their accounts hijacked in the last several days.

It appears accounts in the auto and car category are significant targets.

ZDNet covered how the hijacking occurred:

The account hacks are the result of a coordinated campaign that consisted of messages luring users to phishing sites, where hackers logged account credentials.

According to a channel owner who managed to recover their account before this article's publication and received additional information from YouTube's staff, we got some insight into how the full attack chain might have gone down.

  • Hackers use phishing emails to lure victims on fake Google login pages, where they collect users' account credentials
  • Hackers break into Google accounts
  • Hackers re-assign popular channels to new owners
  • Hackers change the channel's vanity URL, giving the original account owner and his followers the impression that their account had been deleted.
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