'Seriously. Fix your printer' — PewDiePie fans hack into printers for a second time in a bid to keep T-Series at bay

• In a bid to help PewDiePie keep his crown on YouTube, printers in at least five countries were hacked with the message, ‘Unsubscribe from T-Series. Subscribe to PewDiePie’.
• This is the second time that vulnerabilities in printer security have been exploited to propagate the message of ‘#savepewdiepie’.
  
• Only this time, the hackers also asked the victims to ‘Seriously. Fix your printer. It can be abused.’

Hackers, who also seem to be fans of the Swedish YouTube vlogger PewDiePie, have launched an attack on printers — again — asking people from around the world to subscribe to his channel. Only this time, the hackers are asking victims to be a little more vigilant with their printer security as well.

The attack seems to have affected nearly 100,000 machines in Chile, Australia, Spain, UK, US and Argentina according to the BBC.

The hackers have provided their Twitter handles on the print-out, inviting victims to get in touch with them should they seek in addressing the security vulnerabilities on their network.



The note varies from country to country in terms of how much context is provided but the underlying message is the same: unsubscribe from T-Series and subscribe to PewDiePie instead.

And, to fix your printer — it can be abused.



In the message, two Twitter handles, @HackerGiraffe and @j3w3r, take credit for the hack. One of the accounts also posted a picture of the hack as it was being executed.


Last month, another printer hack was administered on over 50,000 printers reading, “Subscribe to PewDiePiew. Stop T-Series.”

Seriously. Fix your printer.

The fact that printers can be hacked into shouldn’t come as a surprise. Quite honestly, anything that’s on a network connected to the Internet without sufficient security or a firewall, can be exploited if hackers know what they’re looking for — and they generally do.

The appeal for PewDiePie was a very mild reminder of what could go wrong if a printer chip is exploited. The hackers explained to the BBC that the printer chips have the potential to cause actual physical damage that could leave a printer defunct.

And more than just forcing a printer to execute a specific message, the vulnerabilities in security could be used to capture the data of other documents being printed by the same machine. And, in some cases, even modify that data as it was being printed.

The India music and movie channel, T-Series, has been on the verge of overtaking PewDiePie’s as the most subscribed channel on YouTube for over a month now but the independent Swedish vlogger’s fan base is doing all that they can to keep that from happening.

This printer hack was only the latest in a series of stunts being pulled to garner support for the independent vlogger who is also known in real life as Felix Kjellberg.