[Edit of January 26, 2020: All's well that ends well. Google has reactivated the Youtubeur channel, which has since resumed operations]
[Edit of January 11, 2020: The channel was closed by Youtube, displaying the message "This account has been closed due to serious or repeated breaches of YouTube's rules regarding spam, deceptive practices and deceptive content, or of other breaches of the terms of use. “Piracy is therefore taken into account. Hopefully a backup and access will be given back to the youtuber quickly.]
Woe, oh great misfortune! What worse nightmare for a YouTuber than losing their channel? This is what has been going through for a few weeks zyro, known youtuber of the Farming Simulator scene. He is not the only one…
He had announced it a short time ago, Stervio had also spread the bad news. If you are subscribed to Dylan Beddes' channel, you should have had a notification from Live for a few hours now. Of course the YouTuber is not at the origin of this live, and for good reason, access to his channel has been stolen. But how ?
Do not fall into the trap
The audience, always the audience. Source of income for those who work on the Google platform. And hackers got it right. Also some of them try fraudulently to grab the biggest Youtube channels. Zyro paid the price. With these 30.000 subscribers well exceeded, the YouTuber saw, in early December, offer by email the services of a company asking for a partnership. So far nothing abnormal, it's commonplace, and "Everything seemed clean" according to Zyro.
For this partnership, it was necessary to test a Discord type application, and to go to a site to create an account. “So I go to the site, and give my password and email address (excluding YouTube). I am referred to an application to install, it was in fact a trojan horse (virus), I also have errors during the installation. 2 days later, I no longer have a channel " testifies Dylan.
Some French Youtubers have recently fallen into the trap, the trojan horse recovers data from Google Chrome: password, history, identifiers, everything goes there, as evidenced by Pimousse, other Youtuber attacked, on his channel.
After installing the virus
Then the person enters the youtubeur's account, and accesses the Google account even with two-factor authentication installed! The hackers then modify the owners of the channel to take control of it. Today Dylan's youtube account has changed its name to become “Ethereum Official” but kept the “Zyro” thumbnail. A live video has been running for several hours and all Farming content has been removed.
The real owner of course has to contact Google to restore access and retrieve its content. Which is not impossible, other pirated videographers have succeeded. Courage Dylan!
Precautions
We can not emphasize this enough. Avoid responding to tempting offers by email promising you fortune and fame. Systematically install double authentication on your accounts (here for google). Do not install haphazard extensions on your browsers. Finally, if you are on Windows, check the proper functioning of the antivirus provided by Microsoft (green light in your taskbar).