Thousands of Publicly Accessible Printers Searchable On Google

Jeremiah Cornelius writes "Blogger Adam Howard at Port3000 has a post about Google's exposure of thousands of publicly accessible printers. 'A quick, well crafted Google search returns "About 86,800 results" for publicly accessible HP printers.' He continues, 'There's something interesting about being able to print to a random location around the world, with no idea of the consequence.' He also warns about these printers as a possible beachhead for deeper network intrusion and exploitation. With many of the HP printers in question containing a web listener and a highly vulnerable and unpatched JVM, I agree that this is not an exotic idea. In the meanwhile? I have an important memo for all Starbucks employees."

Comments

Insert Cheese

[fluffy99]

I wonder if any of them are the older HP LaserJets where you could change the display to read funny things like "Insert Cheese" or "Low on Mayo"?
http://community.spiceworks.com/scripts/show/1184-change-a-networked-hp-laserjet-ready-message
http://miscellany.kovaya.com/2007/10/insert-coin.html

Re:Insert Cheese

[Laebshade]

% cd projects/pevil
% cat pevil
#!/usr/bin/perl

use warnings;
use strict;
use 5.014;
use Printer::HP::Display;

my $printer_ip = "172.30.20.129";
my $printer = Printer::HP::Display->new($printer_ip);

my ($text) = @ARGV;
my $message = "I'm sorry Dave, I can't print that.";
$message = $text if defined $text;

$printer->set_display($message);
say $printer->get_display;

Re:Insert Cheese

[Nimey]

I did that to my old department head's printer a few years ago. I think it was asking for $0.25 to be inserted for a few weeks before he asked me to fix it.

Re:Insert Cheese

[Lehk228]

i would love to do that, but the knuckleheads i work with would end up jamming quarters into the vents on the printer

Very useful

[scotts13]

(GRIN) At one time, I had dial-in access to the Apple corporate network; back then AppleTalk and PAP were still supported. When I was having trouble getting an employee to answer his email, I'd just print the message to the printer in his office. That would usually get his or her attention.

Re:Imagine...

[Splab]

Since you are abusing their equipment, you are probably going to be up for all sorts of fun unlawful computer acts.

And if you are going to prank them, send the "You're fired" from back to the future...

First page of Google results

[jfdavis668]

I pity the people who's printers show up on the first page of Google results.

Re:Imagine...

[Anonymous Coward]

You Sir are a knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition.

Re:already used for spam...

[Scarletdown]

Balls do not pay the rent.

I suppose that depends on what you do for a living.

Re:already used for spam...

[arglebargle_xiv]

What I loved were the printers at all three of the colleges I went to all had complicated systems set up so that they could charge you to print on the printers. However, open up wireshark and in less than a second, you would receive a couple hundred packets from printers advertizing themselves. And it wasn't just student printers either; the very printers they were charging us to print from availible for free and letting everybody know.

It's even worse than that, given that university regulations require that all software of this kind is developed in-house by underpaid student interns, the accounting software is usually as sucky as you can get. When I was a student you could set the page count in your postscript jobs to a negative value and it'd credit your account every time you printed something. I paid off my student loan that way.