Fans Take Action After Subscriber War

For quite some time now, the massive YouTuber Pewdiepie has been having a subscriber war with another youtube channel named T-Series. An Indian music channel that is tailing him for the most subscribers on youtube. As of writing this Pewdiepie is ahead but only by 100,000 subscribers. Both channels have 72 million subs.

Pewdiepie has been very vocal about this, mostly joking on how he might lose the number one spot. Encouraging people to share his video so he can remain number one. One loyal fan even bought billboard ads, car ads, and even go on the radio to promote him.

It seems to be that his loyal fan base is at it again, but instead of buying ads a hacker by the name of TheHackerGiraffe hacked roughly 50,000 printers. After he did, he printed out a simple message for everyone near these printers to see, “Subscribe to Pewdiepie”.

Many people from around the world went on Twitter to voice their confusion about the whole thing.

“So this just randomly printed on one of our work printers. I think @pewdiepie has hacked our systems” – Dr. Moxmo(@Dr_Moxmo)

“@Pewdiepie I work in IT around Brighton and our printers are being hacked… is this your propaganda?”- Georgia Barton(@Georgia_bizzle)

How and Why was this Done?

People from all around the world were hit with this friendly hack. The hacker had said he was able to do this thanks to Shodan.io which is a search engine for unsecured internet-connected devices. He even said there were about 800,000 printers total that came up for him to hack.

He sent the message using a tool known as Printer Exploitation Toolkit or PRET for short. In a nutshell, PRET allows you to hack printers and do whatever you want with them. He went on to tell the Engadment.com he did it because “I am honestly a huge fan of Pewds to begin with, but at the same time I wanted a light-hearted message that would kind of humanize me instead of a big scary YOU’VE BEEN HACKED”.

He went on to say “I am a huge fan of Pewdiepie and thought it might give him a slight edge in his struggle to remain number one.”

So if you don’t want your printer to be hacked or don’t like Pewdiepie make sure to beef up your printer security.