‘We spent all day on tenterhooks urging You Tube to freeze it so the hackers could not tamper with it,’ journalist Barkha Dutt said.
Veteran journalist Barkha Dutt on Monday said the YouTube account of her digital news platform, The Mojo Story, has lost all its content after hackers gained access to the account and deleted videos on the platform. She said her company had urged YouTube several times to “freeze the platform so that the hackers could not alter it”.
“After hours of urging @TeamYouTube to act and being assured action is being taken, I woke up to find @themojostory 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 tweeted, tagging Neal Mohan, YouTube’s Indian-origin CEO.
Hackers renamed the news platform’s YouTube account as “@teslanewstar05” and deleted all videos. They added a video featuring billionaire Elon Musk.
“I don’t know how many times we urged @YouTube to freeze the platform so that the hackers could not alter it. But we kept being told “process of investigation has to be followed” – and now it’s gone,” Barkha Dutt tweeted.
The platform lost its YouTube content a day after Dutt took to Twitter to say that The Mojo Story‘s e-mail and YouTube accounts have been hacked and that the team is unable to access them.
Moneycontrol has reached out to the representatives of YouTube for a comment. This report will be updated when they respond.
In 2020, during the COVID-19 lockdown, Dutt and The Mojo Story team traveled 30,000 km, spent four months on the road, reporting from 14 states across India.
