A hacker yesterday hijacked more than 50,000 internet-connected printers worldwide to print out flyers asking everyone to subscribe to PewDiePie YouTube channel:
PewDiePie, the currently most subscribed to channel on YouTube, is at stake of losing his position as the number one position by an Indian company called T-Series that simply uploads videos of Bollywood trailers and songs.
--- WHAT TO DO ---
1. Unsubscribe from T-Series
2. Subscribe to PewDiePie
A hacker by the named of TheHackerGiraffe, took credit for the stunt, and revealed to Engadget that he found the suspectible printers via Shodan.io -- which is essentially a search engine that finds unsecured and vulnerable devices that are connected to the Internet, like many printers. According to TheHackerGiraffe, there were about 800,000 printers that could have been exploited.
TheHackerGiraffe said while speaking to The Verge. “Hackers could have stolen files, installed malware, caused physical damage to the printers and even use the printer as a foothold into the inner network.
"The most horrifying part is: I never considered hacking printers before, the whole learning, downloading and scripting process took no more than 30 minutes.”
As for how it was done, the hacker claims it was via a tool called PRET (https://github.com/RUB-NDS/PRET), which allows for hackers to capture and manipulate print jobs by accessing a printer's file system and memory. Using the tool, a hacker could cause physical damage to the device or use said device as a foothold to get into the inner network that the printer is connected to.
https://thehackernews.com/2018/11/pewdiepie-printer-hack.html
https://twitter.com/HackerGiraffe/status/1068714506770149376