The Supreme Court of India regained control of its official YouTube account shortly after it was hijacked by cryptocurrency scammers selling fake XRP investments.
On Sept. 20, the Supreme Court of India’s YouTube account was used to broadcast a livestream video about fake XRP investments featuring Ripple Labs CEO Brad Garlinghouse.
The hackers rebranded the channel to resemble Ripple and deleted all previously uploaded content, as shown in the screenshot below.
The streaming platform took down the compromised YouTube account on the same day it was hacked. The Supreme Court of India concurrently issued a public notice about the incident, stating, “This is to inform all concerned that the YouTube channel of Supreme Court of India has been taken down.”
In a follow-up update on the same day, the Indian Supreme Court announced that its YouTube account had been successfully recovered from the XRP hackers.
However, further investigation by Cointelegraph revealed that YouTube could not recover the channel’s original subscriber base of over 217,000 followers and video uploads. Moreover, the channel was renamed to ‘Vansh’ and had only 15 subscribers.
The incident underscores the ongoing vulnerability of online platforms to hacking and the need for robust security measures to protect against such scams.