The official website of the Wall Street Journal was hacked earlier today after unknown hackers defaced it with messages in support of PewDiePie (Felix Kjellberg), the most widely followed YouTuber.
The hackers left a deface page along with a message on the domain (partners.wsj.com) that WSJ uses to publish content paid for by advertisers. The deface message was published in such a way that it looked like the newspaper was apologizing to PewDiePie for publishing articles accusing him of being anti-semitic.
The message went on the claim that the WSJ is sponsoring PewDiePie to reach maximum subscribers to beat T-Series to 80 million. Furthermore, hackers also asked for readers’ credit card number, expiry date, and 3 digit CVV code.
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 80million. We also need your credit card number, expiry date, and the lucky 3 digits on the back to win the chicken dinner in fortnite.
A full preview of the deface page is available at web.archive.
For those who are unaware of PewDiePie vs. T-Series subscription war on YouTube; from the past couple of months, PewDiePie and T-Series have been fighting over YouTube as both channels are eager to beat each other by obtaining maximum subscribers.
Moreover, hackers have jumped in support of PewDiePie after hacking over 50,000 printers on December 1st and 100,000 printers on December 16th. In both cases, hackers sent out printout messages urging users to subscribe to PewDiePie’s YouTube channel and unsubscribe T-Series.
In a conversation with Motherboard, the hackers behind the defacement said that they compromised WSJ content management system after obtaining its login credentials. The WSJ, on the other hand, has also acknowledged the hack and removed the defacement page.
A look at PewDiePie’s official Twitter account indicates that he is aware of all three hacking attacks that were conducted in his support. In response to the latest attack PewDiePie tweeted that, “WSJ joins the fight vs T-series (1) and lol they deleted it, WSJ is still on angry list (2).”
At the time of publishing this article; the defacement page was removed from WSJ’s website while PewDiePie was leading with 77 million subscribers and T-Series was at 75 million subscribers count.
