50,000 printers hacked to help PewDiePie vlogger to subscribers

The Swedish vlogger PewDiePie and record label T-Series from India compete for the crown on YouTube: who has the most subscribers? To help the Swedish vlogger, someone has hacked 50,000 printers worldwide to ask people to subscribe to his channel, reports The Next Web.

The war for subscribers between the two channels began a few months ago. T-Series then saw rapid growth in its subscribers, reaching 59 million followers. In October, the two channels were in a neck to neck race, as more people started following the T-Series channel. Fans of PewDiePie decided to start several campaigns to make sure that the Swede would stay at number one.

A person under the pseudonym TheHackerGiraffe decided to hack printers to help the vlogger. He found a repository of 800,000 open printers on Shodan.io. Shodan.io is a search engine that makes it possible to find devices that are connected to the Internet.

The hacker took over 50,000 of those printers and sent a command to print a message. The message explains how PewDiePie might lose its position on YouTube as the channel with the most subscribers to an Indian company called T-Series, which only uploads movie trailers and music. The message also encourages people to sign up for the Swedish vlogger’s channel and spread the message via the hashtag #SavePewDiePie on their social media.

Underestimated

The hacker himself states that it only took him 30 minutes to learn how to do this, to write the code and to take control of the printer. “People underestimate how easily a rogue hacker could have exploited a vulnerability like this to cause major problems,” says the hacker to The Verge.

“Hackers could have stolen files, installed malware, caused physical damage to the printers, and even used the printer to access the rest of the network.