Smart-TVs, Chromecasts and Google Home equipment hacked to support YouTube star

Last December someone hacked printers to support YouTube star PewDiePie. Now the hacker is active again and claims to have hacked these Chromecasts, smart-tvs and Google Home devices. The hacker wants to help PewDiePie with the hacking of equipment, although it is not certain to what extent this will actually work.

According to the site ZDNet, the hacker goes through life under the name TheHackerGiraffe. The hacker abuses a CastHack, which abuses users who have misconfigured their routers and enabled the Universal Plug n Play service. The hacker focused on ports exposed to the Internet and used by smart-tvs, Chromecasts and Google Home devices for internal management.

Exposed to the Internet

The people whose device was cracked were shown a message: your Chromecast/smart-tv has been exposed to the public internet and exposes sensitive information about you! and the message you should also subscribe to PewDiePie.

In the hack there is also a link for users to protect their device against hackers. People who click on it, however, end up on a YouTube video of singer Rick Astley who sings the song Never Gonna Give You Up. That’s been part of a joke on the internet for a long time.

Simple containment

A Google spokesman tells Variety that users can easily restrict the ability to play external videos on their devices. For this purpose, users can disable Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), according to the spokesperson. Please note that turning off UPnP will prevent some of the devices that use it (including printers and gaming consoles) from functioning properly.

The hacker is cracking devices to help internet star PewDiePie in his fight with the Indian music channel T-Series. Last night, PewDiePie had 79.5 million subscribers and T-Series in total 78.5 million.