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Hacker Weev Admits To Hacking Printers To Spew Racist and Anti-Semitic Messages (softpedia.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Andrew Auernheimer, a black hat hacker known as "Weev," has admitted to hacking thousands of Internet-connected printers and making them print-out racist and anti-semitic messages. As you'd expect, the hack took place after the hacker used a simple port scanner and found millions of unprotected, Internet-accessible printers. He then used a one-line Bash command that sent them a PostScript file on port 9100. This triggered all printers to print his anti-semitic message. Ironically, the hacker is a former Jew turned neo-nazi while incarcerated for a questionable "hacking" incident when he revealed to Gawker that ATT had failed to protect one of their servers. The printer hack affected devices at USC, UC Berkeley, Northwestern, UMass, Princeton, Brown University, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, DePaul University in Chicago, Clark University in Worcester, and many more.
Except some places. Here, for example, the admin blocks access to known printers at the router.
But this was not "hacking a printer". It was using a publicly available printer for the purpose it was designed to do. It took no intelligence to do this, no modification to the printers, only a brute force scan of the net for addresses with an open port 9100. Yawn. Very impressive.
DHCP doesn't mean the IP isn't fixed (they can use static leases), and many universities have large IP blocks, so they don't use RFC1918 addresses.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
"DHCP hands out internet ip's?"
DHCP will hand you out whatever IP address it is configured to. Why do you think it would work any different?
"WTF why"
If you mean, technically, the right question would be WTF not? If you are asking why some institution would manage public IP addresses that way, that's because universities got into the Internet thingie quite soon and quite a lot of them got B classes and they assigned public IP addresses just to any single device that required and IP (there was no NAT and basically no need for that back then) and some of that management has percolated to present day.
"why not give printers fixed IP's"
Because back then, it worked basically in a self management way; once IT departments started to appear, they were usually less capable and less available than the self-management they were meant to substitute so in order to both avoid back-pressure and allow things being done, in many situations they ended up going for the less resistance path -any way, the one that gave them less work, and so you end up with a DHCP environment both giving public IP addresses and no assignations (and usually only minor segmentation).
Now, go off my lawn.
Funny, it doesn't look very defunct. Then again, it might look that way to an outsider, especially since it's basically won. Sites that were unethical, spouting garbage or running identity politics are either gone or suffering heavily financially. People who parroted those views have either quit or been fired, or moved down in the world to even worse sites. Not only can't you stop mentioning it, the media can't either. There's still 1-2 stories nearly every day about it. I think my personal favorite is how gamergate is now all the evils of the internet and worse then 4chan all rolled into one. Never mind of course that Weev was never a e-celeb or proponent. He was a successful troll in some aspects but that's it. Note how many articles there are spouting his pov...a whole not even one page of results from one of the main gamergate hubs. Yep, such a huge following, not only that but he's labeled as exactly who he is right off the bat. A member of GNAA, and his view points are spelt out right too.
One also can't forget that gamergate unlike those on the regressive left or regressive right doesn't believe in identity politics being the answer, rather that identity politics is cancer. Which means if someone has a good idea, it doesn't matter who they actually are. But, then again you've got all those people on the regressive left side of the spectrum that are pedophile defenders or openly pedophiles, that you like to rally around.
Om, nomnomnom...
For those who don't know, weev is a member of a group that calls themselves the GNAA They formed over a decade ago for the purpose of committing abuse on Slashdot and other places. Every wonder why Slashdot scans you for being an open proxy before you post? That's because they abused unsecured proxies to flood Slashdot with thousands of spam comments. They flooded many other blogs in the same way, with the same spam inviting people to join their group. I suspect the message being flooded to printers is probably pretty close to the typical spam that gets posted to Slashdot. The background on weev actually explains a lot; the old messages used to include text like, "lol, jews did wtc," which clearly the antisemitism associated with weev. While they claim to be a security organization and spawned "Goatse Security," they're mostly a bunch of immature script kiddies looking to cause as much trouble as possible.
Note: Shame on you, Slashdot. Apparently I can't even post "Gay Niggger Association of America" (misspelling is intentional, to avoid the lameness filter), which happens to be ontopic and very relevant here. I understand the desire to get rid of spam, but surely there's a better way to stop it.
I know it can be confusing but, Jew actually references two separate things. There's "Jew" as in the Judah religion which is something you can adopt or leave as most other religions. When you hear "former Jew", this is always what they are referring to. The second is ethnic "Jew" which refers to family lineages dating back to ancient Sumer and is not something you can leave. Most religious Jews and ex-Jews are also ethnic Jews but, there are exceptions. This is why Christian Jew or Muslim Jew are not oxymorons. Neo-nazi Jews have got to be some of the most self-loathing people on the planet.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -