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Hardcoded Administrator Account Opens Backdoor Access To Samsung Printers
hypnosec writes "A new flaw has been discovered in printers manufactured by Samsung whereby a backdoor in the form of an administrator account would enable attackers to not only take control of the flawed device, but will also allow them to attack other systems in the network. According to a warning on US-CERT the administrator account is hard-coded in the device in the form of an SNMP community string with full read-write access. The backdoor is not only present in Samsung printers but also in Dell printers that have been manufactured by Samsung. The administrator account remains active even if SNMP is disabled from the printer's administration interface."
Question: Does anyone know if this exploit could be used to alter/remove the tracking dots every color laser printer marks its documents with?
No need. Following a link from the page you posted shows Samsung doesn't have tracking dots.
They're copying Apple's?
Yes. Because we don't want any way to prevent student A from cancelling student B's jobs. Or any way for a trusted user, such as the sysadmin, from cancelling all jobs.
And we definitely want all nimwits on the network to have complete and arbitrary control over how many pages they can use, or how much ink. Maximum quality print jobs in a comp sci department printer? No problem! (I remember watching a dot-matrix printer spit out a core file, that was entertaining.)
Definitely, no good whatsoever could come from a printer with any authentication control.
Obviously, Samsung agrees, because all their printers apparently have the same unchangeable admin account and password.
but will also allow them to attack other systems in the network
We had one go on a rampage last week! It tore up half the bay before a couple of us beat to death with a dictionary and one of those big staplers from the copy room. WHY WOULD THEY EVEN PUT HIDDEN ARMS AND LEGS ON A PRINTER?!
not if you need singed paper work
Good point. No matter how much heat you apply, you can't get a good char on a softcopy. Not even a little browning. You just burn your monitor.
Nothing burns, shreds, or pulps like paper.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Someone needs to invent a fairly simple device. It would have two Ethernet ports and a USB port. The USB port is used for programming it, perhaps then used for power. The Ethernet ports would be used for bridging/routing.
You put the device between whatever device and the rest of the network, select what purpose the device does, (or manually specify ports), and call it done, with the thing automatically proxying/masquerading. Print job hits port 515 on the device, the device sends the packets to the printer.
This way, even if there is some unknown port, it gets shut off.
Of course, the next step for backdoors would be backdoors in protocols (such as unique packets that normally would get ignored), but that can be found by DPI.
Oh good, because we wouldn't want to have any assurances that our 100MB print jobs were transferred to the printer successfully... Or know when they're running low on toner... or that there's a paper jam and the printer has caught fire... or be able to tell it to use the media in tray number 5... or be able to connect a printer to your WiFi network.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
That's the first thing I thought too, that if we just discovered this in Samsung printers is there a hardcoded backdoor in Samsung galaxy s3 phones too?
Hmm... Good question. If I had one myself, I could tell you just by looking... Does the S3 come with a paper feeder? If so, it certainly has a back door of some kind.
I mean, how else do you clear paper jams?