The battle between Pewdiepie and T-Series to gain the maximum number of subscribers is roaring up a huge fire among the netizens. And putting into practice the saying ‘Everything is fair in love and war’ are fans of Pewdiepie who have gone so far as to hack smart devices like Google Home, Alexa and Chromecasts to promote Pewdiepie.
The hackers seek and find Chromecast dongles like Google Home speakers and smart TVs that are connected to poorly configured routers and broadcast a message asking them to subscribe to Pewdiepie.
The Dirty Games
In January 2019, more than 5500 devices of Google’s Chromecast were hacked to play a message, ‘Your Chromecast/Smart TV is exposed to the public internet and is exposing sensitive information about you!’ After the message, a link is displayed that says, ‘You should also Subscribe to PewDiePie.’
This is the work of two hackers who go by the name ‘TheHackerGiraffe’ and ‘j3ws3r’. This is also not the first time hacking was looked at as a means of promotion. 800,000 printers were hacked in December, which made them print out a message urging printer users to support Pewdiepie in his battle against T-Series.
In an email to Cnet, TheHackerGiraffe said that their intention behind this was to warn people about how easily can their devices be hacked. The hackers’ mischiefs didn’t miss Pewdiepie’s eye who reacted, ‘doing gods work’ to the hacker’s tweet.
The Struggle of The Subscribes
Pewdiepie has been one of the leading channels on Youtube since 2013. India based music company, T-series has been allegedly competing with the former in a bid to gain the highest number of subscribers. Pewdiepie is a Swedish video game commentator, a comedy YouTuber, whose jokes are borderline racist, and the most followed Youtuber with 72.5 million followers.
On the other side of the battlefield is T-Series, a Bollywood Music Company which uploads Bollywood music videos, film trailers and other such videos on its YouTube channel. T-Series’s channel became the most viewed channel in January 2017. Taking this as a challenge, Pewdiepie picked a fight with T-Series which incurred the wrath of many angry Pewdiepie fans.
After noticing the hate spewing around, Pewdiepie released a video asking his viewers to support the Indian NGO Child Rights and You.
T-Series unperturbed
T-Series chairman and managing director Bhushan Kumar, son of late founder Gulshan Kumar, said in an interview to the BBC that he is not bothered by this race and does not know why Pewdiepie has taken this so seriously, “We are not competing with him.”