This story is quite unbelievable but it happened. Throughout this article, we will look to break down the back story and dive deeper into the Hack.
PewDiePie is an independent Youtuber with the largest subscription base on the Google YT platform with over 70 Million subscribers. PewDiePie who’s real name is Felix Kjellberg, is known for his game commentary, meme commentary and general news content, has had the most subscribers on YouTube since 2013 and now T-Series, a large Indian based Bollywood production company, is close to passing the independent YouTuber, and within’ the Youtube community there are a lot of people supporting PewDiePie to keep him at the top of the platform with some going as far as Purchasing ALL the billboards in his city to promote the subscription to PewDiePie.
Now the war for “most-subscribed YouTube channel” crown between the independent artist and the Major production company just took a very interesting turn after a hacker hijacked more than 50,000 internet-connected printers worldwide to print out flyers asking everyone to subscribe to PewDiePie’s YouTube Channel.
From this fear that PewDiePie won’t remain the number one most-subscribed YouTuber in the world, an anonymous hacker (probably a die-hard fan) with the Twitter username “TheHackerGiraffe” came up with an interesting hack idea to support Felix.
What Exactly Happened?
PewDiePie’s die-hard fan, TheHackerGiraffe, scanned the internet to find the list of vulnerable printers with port 9100 open using Shodan, a search engine for internet-connected devices, once the hacker found the vulnerable printers he exploited them to spew out a message, saying:
“PewDiePie, is in trouble, and 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 cimply uploads videos of Bollywood trailers and campaigns,”
The message then urged hack victims to unsubscribe from T-Series channel and to go and subscribe to the PewDiePie channel instead.
The hacker used 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.
Outcomes
Though this little easy printer trick raised security awareness of leaving your printer vulnerable online, law officials 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. Will tweet everything about this entire #pewdiepie hack later to explain to everyone exactly what went down. Also @pewdiepie please notice me
— TheHackerGiraffe (@HackerGiraffe) November 30, 2018
Best of luck to PewDiePie in his quest to stay on top of the YouTube space as the gap between the two closes. Tech Patrol would like to say “Subscribe to PewDiePie” but if you would like to know if you’re protected from such simple hacks as this contact me, we would love to do an assessment of your network and make sure that you’re secure.
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