The YouTube channel of one of Ghana’s renowned and most followed digital content creators has become the latest target of a cyber attack.
Wode Maya’s channel with more than 1.2 million subscribers has been hacked – with the channel name changed and all videos deleted as well.
The hackers hijacked the channel on Thursday 23 Feb 2023 and renamed it from Wode Maya to Microstrategy (@micro_strategy0) – an American company that provides business intelligence, mobile software, and cloud-based services to customers.
However, the hack has raised suspicion among many people who believe Wode Maya rather “rented” out his channel to Microstrategy – which also has investments in Bitcoin – to host a one-week event.
These speculators assert that Wode Maya will get his account back in a week’s time with all his videos intact. So, the assumption here is that Wode Maya temporarily sold his YouTube account to Microstrategy for huge cash.
But what we have gathered so far underscores the claims being circulated as many other YouTubers around the world have also faced similar cyber attacks from the hackers who pose as MicroStrategy.
One thing we can confirm is that, MicroStrategy is not affiliated in any way with Microstrategy which is controlled by the hackers, and that their name is only being used cunningly. In fact, MicroStrategy has its own YouTube account with a little over 30,000 subscribers.
And as a public company founded 30 years ago, there’s no logical sense in engaging in such a ridiculous activity to ruin its hard-earned reputation. Neither have they bought the account temporarily as speculated.
These hackers are said to be high-level computer wizards from Russia who target big channels, take over their accounts, and broadcast content distinct from the channel’s purpose.
They are able to do this by breaching the victim’s Gmail account linked to the channel and taking total control of it permanently.
In some cases, Google which owns Gmail and YouTube is able to retrieve the account from the hacker and restore it for the victim after a series of support communications.
As it stands, the fate of Wode Maya’s YouTube account is still unknown.
