YouTube has launched a new AI troubleshooter to help users recover their accounts after being hacked.
The AI chatbot “Support Assistant” acts as a guide to help users re-secure their logins and recover their accounts after being hacked.
Eligible users can access the tool by clicking on the “Chat with Hacked Channel Assistant” button on the YouTube Help Center.
If you select this option, the chatbot will ask you a series of questions about your user and their account to secure your Google login and reverse any changes made by a hacker to your channel.
The tool encourages users to tighten up the security of their accounts to reduce the risk of being hacked in the future.
The new tool is currently only available in English, and certain troubleshooting features within the tool are only available to “certain users,” although Google-owned YouTube plans to make the features available to all users in the future.
Dealing with the rise in social media hacks
The AI chatbot is designed to speed up and simplify the YouTube account recovery process.
Recovering hacked social media accounts, including YouTube, can be a lengthy process, potentially resulting in a significant loss of income for users such as influencers and other content creators.
Every YouTube channel is associated with at least one Google account, so if a YouTube channel is hacked, at least one of the Google accounts associated with that channel will also be compromised.
Cyber threat actors target social media accounts for a variety of reasons, including launching phishing attacks and spreading malware.
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In early 2024, a number of well-known social media accounts, including those of Certik and Mandiant, were hijacked by scammers to share links to malicious websites.
In January 2024, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) X (formerly Twitter) account was compromised, with hackers posting a fake announcement regarding the approval of a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) on stock exchanges.
There have also been numerous incidents of social media hacking, where accounts are flooded with obscene or offensive content for no monetary gain.
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