More printers have been targeted and the Wall Street Journal hacked in the latest attempt by supporters to gain more followers for YouTuber star PewDiePie in his battle against Bollywood music channel T-Series.

The first round of printer attacks occurred early this month, with about 50,000 printers worldwide being made to print out flyers telling people to subscribe to PewDiePie.

The new attack, led by the same hacker as the previous attack, has seen pro-PewDiePie messages printed out on more than 100,000 printers worldwide.

The details of the new attack are few, but Alex Bazhaniuk, co-founder and chief technology officer of Eclypsium Inc., told SiliconANGLE that it appears that attacker is exploiting vulnerabilities in printers accessible by anyone on the internet.

“In this incident, the attacker indicates that they could wear out one of the parts to cause permanent damage,” Bazhaniuk said. “We’ve seen this sort of thing in our research with flash storage, where an attacker can damage persistent storage media, like flash memory chips, by sending many write or erase cycles. It’s essential that printers are not directly connected to an outside network to avoid situations like this.”

While printers worldwide were printing PewDiePie subscription messages, someone managed to hack the Wall Street Journal and insert a fake news item about the star.

The hack occurred at around 11:45 a.m. EST, Dec. 17 with a page being edited to 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 Tseries to 80 million. We also need your credit card number, expiry date, and the lucky 3 digits on the back to win the chicken dinner in fortnite.”

The Journal said it was aware of the hack and the page was taken down within 10 minutes.

The relationship between the Journal and PewDiePie, whose real name is Felix Kjellberg, has long been a contentious one. The newspaper published a story on the star back in February 2017 that outlined several examples of antisemitic videos.

That single story resulted in Kjellberg losing a contract with the Walt Disney Co. and his YouTube Premium series. It also sparked the “adpocalypse,” the boycott by major advertisers of YouTube over ads being played against contentious content.

Photo: PewDiePie