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 50,000
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]
“PewDiePie is in trouble, and he needs your help to defeat
T-Series!”
“PewDiePie, the currently most subscribed to channel on YouTube, is
at stake of losing his position as the number one position by an
Indian company called T-Series that simply uploads videos of
Bollywood trailers and campaigns,”
T-Series channel and subscribe to PewDiePie instead.
The hacker mainly uses an open-source hacking tool to exploit
vulnerable printers, called Printer Exploitation Toolkit
(PRET), which has been designed for testing printers against
various known vulnerabilities, allowing attackers to capture or
manipulate print jobs.
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.
“Spread the word with your friends about printers and printer
security! This is actually a scary matter,” the hacker tweeted[2].
literally enough for hackers 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.
References
Read more http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheHackersNews/~3/VmC4Pt0aSuY/pewdiepie-printer-hack.html