A cyberattack on Friday took over an official social media account of a major judicial institution and replaced its standard posts of legal proceedings with other unrelated content.

The Supreme Court of India's YouTube channel was hacked by scammers who appeared to promote a cryptocurrency called XRP from a U.S.-based company known as Ripple Labs, according to legal news site Bar & Bench.

Authorities are currently investigating the concerning incident and it is believed that the channel will soon be restored.

Supreme Court's official channel taken over

The Times of India reported that the official YouTube channel for the Supreme Court of India, which typically broadcasts live streams of important cases involving constitutional issues or other matters of public interest, was taken over by hackers on Friday.

The hackers appear to have set all of the channel's legal content to "private" and instead aired a blank video titled "Brad Garlinghouse: Ripple Responds To The SEC's $2 Billion Fine! XRP PRICE PREDICTION!"

Garlinghouse is the CEO of Ripple Labs, a U.S.-based company that offers the XRP cryptocurrency and has been involved in a legal dispute with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

In a public statement, the Supreme Court of India said, "This is to inform all concerned that the YouTube channel of  Supreme Court of India has been taken down. The services on  YouTube channel of Supreme Court of India will be resumed shortly."

As of the time this story was written, the Supreme Court of India's official YouTube channel was still down but was now replaced with a "404 Not Found" message and a brief statement that said, "This page isn't available. Sorry about that. Try searching for something else."

Supreme Court of India has been live-streaming proceedings since 2018

IndiaTV reported that law enforcement authorities are investigating the hack and hope to find and hold accountable whoever is responsible. Meanwhile, the breach has raised serious concerns about the online security measures to protect the government's digital assets.

The outlet noted that the Supreme Court of India voted unanimously in 2018 to begin live-streaming some of its legal proceedings after it was determined that doing so was covered by the constitutional guarantee of India's "fundamental right to access justice."

Since then, the YouTube channel has aired live streams of "hearings on cases of national importance, such as disputes on the interpretation of the Constitution, issues affecting civil rights, electoral reforms, and other matters of public interest."

This has been a problem for years

IndiaTV reported that there has been a marked increase in recent years of hackers and scammers targeting and taking over popular video channels and, interestingly enough, Ripple Labs has previously been involved in such incidents.

A 2020 report from The Verge noted that Ripple filed a lawsuit against YouTube over its "inexplicable failure" to respond to numerous complaints about scammers impersonating the company and its CEO Garlinghouse to lend credibility to fake ads for cryptocurrency giveaways that would con unsuspecting viewers into making small payments to the scammers.

At the time, Ripple said its lawsuit was intended to "prompt an industry wide-behavior change and set the expectation of accountability." As for YouTube, it said in a statement at that time that "we take abuse of our platform seriously, and take action quickly when we detect violations of our policies, such as scams or impersonation."