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Hackers breach House of Representatives’ YouTube to promote online gambling
The unidentified hackers posted multiple live-streamed videos on the channel, showing online gambling apps with narration in Turkish in the background.
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Illustration of a hacker. (Unsplash/Towfiqu Barbhuiya)
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nidentified hackers seized control of the official YouTube account of the House of Representatives on Wednesday and used the platform to post advertisements promoting online gambling.
The hackers replaced the House logo as the channel’s profile picture with an image of a golden slot machine, with text written “Slot Baris”. They also posted multiple live-streamed videos showing online gambling apps with narration in Turkish in the background.
Thousands of netizens tuned in to watch the live streams, with some commenting that they found the incident “hilarious”.
House secretary-general Indra Iskandar confirmed the hacking, saying officials had reached out to Indonesian representatives of Google to recover access to the YouTube account, which had 280,000 subscribers at the time of the hacking.
“The Google team has contacted its headquarters to recover the account. In the meantime, our internal IT team is also trying to recover the account manually through the Google system,” Indra said in a statement on Wednesday.
The online gambling live streams had been removed when The Jakarta Post accessed the YouTube channel at around 11 a.m. on Wednesday. However, the account was inaccessible when the Post retried accessing it later in the day.
Read also: Bad obsession: Online gambling addicts share stories of lost and pain
