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07/02/2017 | Hijacked Printers Spew Warning Messages

Ramiro Mantilla

A hacker has briefly hijacked more than 150,000 printers accidentally left accessible via the web. Although the attack was harmless, owners would be wise to heed the warning.

 

Office printers, home devices and retail receipt printers are among those affected, according to messages on social media.

A typical message read: "stackoverflowin the hacker god has returned, your printer is part of a flaming botnet, operating on putin's forehead utilising BTI's (break the Internet) complete infrastructure", while another stated, "for the love of God, please close this port, skid", referring to a "script kiddie", or novice programmer.

Stackoverflowin appears to have carried out the attack by running an automated program which scanned the internet looking for vulnerable printers, and then making these printers produce the warning note.

Two versions of the message were reportedly sent out - the first with an ASCII art depicting a robot and the second with ASCII art showing a computer.

Also included were an email address and a Twitter handle for Stackoverflowin. You can also use a firewall to restrict access to the printer.

Slackoverflowin didn't discriminate between brands of printers either - Canon, Brother, Epson, HP, Samsung and Konica Minolta were amongst the list of the 150,000 affected printers. Speaking to Bleeping Computer, he said, "People have done this in the past and sent racist flyers, etc". "Everyone's been cool about it and thanked me to be honest".

Last week, computer security researchers Jens Muller, Vladislav Mladenov and Juraj Somorovsky, from the Ruhr University, in Germany, released an academic paper summarising work they had done on printer security.

The trio tested 20 separate printers and found that all of them were vulnerable to at least one type of attack.

Following recent research that showed many printer models are vulnerable to attacks, a hacker made a decision to prove the point and forced thousands of publicly exposed printers to spew out rogue messages.

Mundoaguaysaneamiento.net (Estados Unidos)

 



 
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