Someone Hacked 150,000 Printers to Promote PewDiePie YouTube Channel

This may sound crazy, but it’s true!

The war for “most-subscribed Youtube channel” crown between
T-Series and PewDiePie just took an interesting turn
after a hacker yesterday hijacked more than 150,000
internet-connected printers worldwide to print out flyers asking
everyone to subscribe to PewDiePie YouTube channel.

PewDiePie, whose real name is Felix Kjellberg, is a famous
YouTuber from Sweden known for his game commentary and pranks and
has had the most subscribers on YouTube since 2013.

However, the channel owned by Bollywood record label T-Series
has been catching up in recent months, and now both are hovering
around 72.5 million YouTube subscribers.

From this fear that PewDiePie won’t remain the number one
most-subscribed YouTuber in the world, an anonymous hacker
(probably his die-hard fan) with the Twitter username
“TheHackerGiraffe” came up with a hackish idea.

TheHackerGiraffe scanned the Internet to find the list of
vulnerable printers with port 9100 open using Shodan, a search
engine for internet-connected devices and exploited them to spew
out a message, saying:
^[1]

And then the message urged hack victims to unsubscribe from
T-Series channel and subscribe to PewDiePie instead.
Though it’s a nice trick to raise cybersecurity awareness and
consequences of leaving vulnerable printers exposed online, law and
information security experts do not recommend other white hat
hackers to participate in such stunts.

Believe it or not, even your fax number is literally enough for a
hacker to gain complete control over the printer and possibly
infiltrate the rest of the network connected to it. Earlier this
year we covered research explaining vulnerabilities discovered in
the communication protocols used in tens of millions of fax
machines globally.

Well, the gap between the two channels is narrowing, let’s see
if PewDiePie could win the crown of most-followed YouTube
channel.