PewDiePie Fans Hack WSJ Site, Printers to Beat T-Series on YouTube

The YouTuber’s fans hacked into printers to print out message urging people to subscribe to his channel.

The message that got printed on people’s printers.

(Photo Courtesy: Twitter/@mattbedank)

Fans of YouTuber PewDiePie hacked into and defaced a section of the Wall Street Journal website and hacked into printers, in order to race ahead of record label T-Series to become the most popular YouTube channel in the world.

As a result of the hack, a fake apology was posted which read, "WallStreet Journal would like to apologize to PewDiePie due to misrepresentation by our journalists, those of whom have now been fired, we are sponsoring PewDiePie to reach maximum subscribers and beat T-Series to 80 million. (sic) " The post has been deleted now.

The Independent UK reported that a WSJ spokesperson was not available for a comment immediately.

Another hacking happened when Felix Kjellberg’s (PieDiePie’s real name) fans hacked into thousands of printers; again urging people to subscribe to the YouTube channel. 

Victims of this printer attack received a printed message asking them to subscribe to PewDiePie on YouTube.

Two Twitter handles claimed to be behind the printer hacks. One hacker, who goes by the name HackerGiraffe, explained his motivation behind the attack in a series of tweets. He said that he found 800,000 exposed printers and picked the first 50,000 which came up.

“While playing around on Shodan (search engine), the idea came to me that maybe I can hack printers around the world to print something. I didn’t know what, at the time. I was horrified to see over 800,000 results showed up in total (unsafe printers). I was baffled, but determined to try and fix this. So I picked the first 50,000 printers I found running on port 9100 and downloaded the list off Shodan.”

HackerGiraffe

He said that while he was wondering what to print, he got the idea to help the YouTuber in his fight against T-Series.

“It didn’t take me long to realize that the most perfect thing to print would be a message supporting our dear overlord @pewdiepie himself!”

This hacking comes as PewDieie has urged his fans to support him in his battle to become the most popular YouTube channel.

The YouTuber himself, was quite impressed with all the efforts made to make him the most popular YouTube. In a video after these incidents, he said, "All this support to keep me on top is so funny, I love it, please keep it up." He also urged his fans to not do anything illegal.