Seemingly random people have been urged to subscribe to PewDiePie by a printer hacker. This hopefully harmless attack comes as the YouTube star has been fighting for subscriber supremacy against another rising channel.
The Verge explains a war has been waging over on YouTube for a while now as the world’s most popular channel is on the edge of being usurped. An Indian music and film production company called T-Series is putting up a fight for YouTube’s top spot and it’s starting to invade people’s homes.
The past few days have seen people upload images to Twitter of printed messages they claim not to have made. The notes ask people to unsubscribe to T-Series and subscribe to PewDiePie. It also urges people to tell everyone they know to do the same.
@pewdiepie I work in IT around Brighton and our Printers are being hacked….is this your propaganda? pic.twitter.com/xIRCGEQoNB
— Georgia Barton (@georgia_bizzle) November 29, 2018
TheHackerGiraffe a new Twitter account has claimed responsibility as the printer hacker and claims they are also aiming to raise awareness of printer security as well as PewDiePie’s imminent fall.
They explain the method behind their printer hacker ways through their tweet. Apparently, they used an open network port which is a known vulnerability held by hundreds of thousands of printers.
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
TheHackerGiraffe also told The Verge that they’d never considered becoming a printer hacker before and got the idea while browsing Shodan.io. This website lists internet-connected devices and TheHackerGirraffe claims that he found more than 800,000 available.
“The most horrifying part is: I never considered hacking printers before,” TheHackerGiraffe told The Verge, and added, “the whole learning, downloading and scripting process took no more than 30 minutes.”
They also say the attack could have been much worse saying that people who are vulnerable could have had files stolen, malware installed, or even had physical damage caused to their devices.
Whether this will help PewDiePie (who recently defended his Twitch Thot comments) or get people to be more secure with their printers remains to be seen.
