PewDiePie vs T-Series: Hacker hijacks 15,000 Indian printers, asks people to subscribe to Swedish YouTuber

California: A hacker has claimed responsibility for taking over 50,000 printers worldwide to print a strange message asking people to subscribe to YouTuber PewDiePie. Of the attacked printers, about 15,000 printers were in India.

The hacker, who goes by the Twitter handle, TheHackerGiraffe, has claimed responsibility for the attack in a Reddit AMA that reads, 'I hacked 50,000 printers worldwide out of potential 800,000 for PewDiePie and security awareness.'

Here is how the entire #pewdiepie printer hack went down:

1. I was bored after playing Destiny 2 for a continous 4 hours, and decided I wanted to hack something. So I thought of any vulnerable protocols I could find on shodan

(1/)

— TheHackerGiraffe (@HackerGiraffe) December 1, 2018

The hacker revealed that he used Shodan, a repository for internet connected devices where he found 80,000 connected printers and decided to attack 50,000 of them to raise awareness about printer security. 

There's a voice in my head telling me to just completely down the T-Series website forever, but the reason I hacked the printers was to keep people safe and informed. Have to stay true to my actual purpose and not just get lost in a fame frenzy.

— TheHackerGiraffe (@HackerGiraffe) December 2, 2018

Felix Kjellberg, better known as PewDiePie, is currently fighting to keep his title of being the number one channel on YouTube. Kjellberg’s position is now threatened by T-Series, an Indian music record label and film production company.

PewDiePie has been actively campaigning against T-Series, trying his best to remain YouTube’s top channel. He has been asking his subscribers to urge people to subscribe to him in a series of videos, diss-tracks and challenges against the Indian company.

Social analytics firm SocialBlade estimates that T-series will overtake PewDiePie very soon.

With agency inputs