Youtubers are getting hacked! What to do if you get hacked, why it's happening and how to prevent it

**If your youtube channel has been hacked jump to 8:06 to get directions on how to reclaim your channel**

There is a growing number of youtubers getting hacked and I was recently one of them. This happened last week and I learned quite a bit about how channels are getting hacked and what to do to get your channel back after it's been hacked, and I wanted to make this video to help you in case your channel has een hacked, or if you haven't been hacked, I wanted to help you prevent being hacked.
Now for those of you who have been hacked and you're freaking out wanting to get your channel back, like I was, look at the top of the video description below where I've listed a time you can to jump to in this video where I discuss the steps you need to take to get your channel back, but if you're someone who wants to learn how youtubers are getting hacked, and how to avoid getting hacked watch the entire video. 
So first I'm going to talk about how I got hacked, then I'm going to talk about what to do if your channel gets hacked, and then I'm going to talk about how to prevent your channel from being hacked. 
So the way I was hacked was through an email from someone claiming that they wanted me to promote one of their products in my videos - I have another youtube channel that is much larger and is part of the youtube partnership program where I make car videos and that channel is called Arc Driver. Every week I get 4 to 5 emails from companies wanting me to promote their products in my videos but those emails are usually from companies I've never heard of and haven't had any interest in talking about their products. 
Then I got an email from a person claiming to be from GoPro. The email looked very legit, the company logos were all over the email, there was lots of contact information for the person reaching out to me and for the gopro company, so it looked legit. I was still a little unsure if the email was for real, so I asked a few questions, and the person responded to all of them, then I started asking questions about the process of promoting their product and they talked about wanting me to make a 15 second video about one of their cameras. 
Everything seemed to be on the up and up and I told them I was interested. After that they sent me a link to sign an agreement through docusign and a code to enter to access the correct document. Before I clicked on anything I did a google search on docusign scams, and from my research, docusign was a legit company and I didn't see anything regarding any scams, But the problem with my search is I only entered the words Docusign and scams, which did not provide me with the information that I really needed to see, so later in this video when I talk how to prevent getting hacked, I'll tell you what search to run to see what the real scams are. Since I couldn't find any docusign scams related to the my situation I was in, I felt like the offer was legit and I clicked on the link, which, which brought up a docusign page that had a field for me to enter the code I was provided. And somehow, entering that code gave them access to my youtube channel, and once they got that, they went into the gmail account and changed all of my security settings to lock me out of both my gmail account and my youtube account.
And it is these emails coming from people saying that they want to do some kind of sponsorship or collaboration where most youtubers are getting their channels hacked from. 
Now once the hackers had kicked me out of my own youtube channel they uploaded a live video that was supposedly talking about dogecoin, but whatever the actual content of the video was, it got my channel taken down immediately due to it going against a number of youtubes guidelines. And thank god it did, because who knows what kind of damage the hackers could have done to my channel if they had control of it any longer. 
Now in the time they did have control of my channel, all they did was upload 1 video, they didn't modify the channel in any other way, and they didn't make any changes to my google adsense account that I get paid through, or at least I couldn't find any evidence of them attempting to do that. 
Without a doubt, the most frustrating thing about this process is just how easy it is for a hacker to prevent you from getting your account back, because all of the security steps that google has in place end up benefiting the hackers much more than the actual owner of the account. 
So as you can see here, as soon as they got into my account, they turned off the 2 step verification that I had previously set up, then they turned it back on with completely different security credentials which would prevent me from ever being able to regain access to my account. They replaced my phone number with theirs, and they created a security key which required specific external media, which only the hacker has, to be plugged into the computer in order to access the account.