A fight between YouTube star PewDiePie and an Indian YouTube channel has spilled into hacking, with an unknown person managing to print support messages on thousands of printers worldwide last week.

For those unfamiliar with the battle, Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg has long been the most popular YouTube channel by number of subscribers. But in the last few months, T-Series, a YouTube channel that specializes in Indian music, has quickly caught up.

Though it has yet to surpass PewDiePie in popularity, T-Series has come constantly close. But it has failed to overtake Kjellberg’s channel thanks to a massive effort among fans to increase the number of subscribers the channel has. The numbers are not insignificant, with millions of new subscribers being added to both channels since September.

The campaigning by fans of PewDiePie has previously gone to some extremes, including people buying billboards supporting PewDiePie, poster campaigns, letterboxing and more. Now printer hacking can be added to the list.

Over the course of the last week, someone going by the pseudonym of @TheHackerGiraffe on Twitter claims to have hacked more than 50,000 printers worldwide to print out flyers telling people to subscribe to PewDiePie.

The hacker claims to have identified exposed printers via the Shadon security search engine and then used a printer exploitation toolkit to order the printers to print out pro-PewDiePie propaganda.

“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 just printing a big scary ‘YOU’VE BEEN HACKED,'” TheHackerGiraffe said in one tweet. “I am a huge fan of PewDiePie and thought it might give him a slight edge in his struggle to remain the number one.”

So this just randomly printed on one of our work printers. I think @pewdiepie has hacked our systems. pic.twitter.com/wSG9cprJ4s

— Dr.Moxmo (@Dr_Moxmo) November 29, 2018

Although the hack caused no harm, the ease with which the hacker gained access to printers using a tool that could have caused damage is now being pitched as a security wakeup call by TheHackerGiraffe itself.

“People underestimate how easy a malicious hacker could have used a vulnerability like this to cause major havoc,” TheHackerGiraffe told 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,” the hacker added.

As of 8:30 p.m. EST Sunday, PewDiePie seems to have broken clear of T-Series with a lead of around 240,000 subscribers.

Photo: PewDiePie