Accordingly, around 9:00 AM on November 26, fans of this famous MC discovered that the YouTube channel “TRẤN THÀNH TOWN” was live streaming a video offering free Bitcoin giveaways in a foreign language.
This video contained a link to a website, encouraging viewers to send a certain amount of cryptocurrency to the address displayed on the screen to receive double the cryptocurrency in return. Reports indicate that the Bitcoin giveaway livestream was broadcast for about 30 minutes before being removed. On his official fanpage, MC Trấn Thành also confirmed that his YouTube channel was hacked, stating that his team is working to recover the channel.
In fact, this is not the first time a famous YouTube channel in Vietnam (which has a large number of subscribers) has been hacked to ‘illegally’ stream videos for scamming purposes. Before Trấn Thành, the YouTube channels of singers Hồ Quang Hiếu and Lý Hải were also attacked to live stream cryptocurrency giveaways. Not only famous artists, but some YouTube channels with hundreds of thousands or millions of subscribers like Vietnam Esports TV and VETV7 Esports have also been targeted by malicious individuals.
According to some technology experts, this is a method of stealing the stream key, which is considered a password and address for the live stream on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch. The stream key helps these platforms identify your live stream (broadcast from your streaming software).
Therefore, when live streaming, users must enter the stream key into streaming software like OBS. However, if this code is leaked, hackers or malicious individuals can easily ‘borrow’ the YouTube channel to live stream, instead of having to directly take over the YouTube channel. Thus, experts recommend that channel owners should reset their stream key after each live stream to avoid falling into such situations.