Esports World Cup, ESL, BLAST YouTube accounts simultaneously comprised to push fake "Memecoin" giveaway

Today the YouTube accounts for the Esports World Cup, ESL Counter-Strike, BLAST Premier, and BLAST Rainbow Six: Siege were all briefly compromised seemingly by the same actor attempting to push a fake "Memecoin" giveaway on the Solana cryptocurrency platform. The four accounts were only compromised for a few minutes before the fake livestreams were shut down, so hopefully the overall damage was minimal.

The cause of the breach and loss of control of their YouTube accounts likely comes down to ESL, BLAST, and the Esports World Cup using a similar pool of contractors for social media work, meaning a single person being phished by a fake email, Slack message, or other attack vector could've caused a bad actor to gain access to multiple accounts.

As the stream on all four accounts was exactly the same, featuring an old recording of Gabe Newell promoting the Steam Deck and a QR code to the "Memcoin" giveaway, they were almost certainly carried out by the same person or persons.

Overall these kind of breaches are common on YouTube, with many large creators over the years having their accounts compromised to do fake giveaways. Overall, this is another reminder (especially to large esports companies) to be careful what links you click on the internet.

Update: Following publication of this article, the official Valve Dota 2 account appears to have been compromised and is pushing a similar version of the scam: