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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.
Many years ago I worked in a University. All devices, printers included, had public IP addresses (and open ports). It was a hang-over from a previous time, when that was just how the uni set things up and deeply tied into the internet billing (charge by the byte) system the uni had. I was only a lowly desktop guy at the time but it was still a real problem for us. Every desktop PC, server, printer, whatever had a public IP. To block any ports, and I am being fully serious here, required approval from the university senate. Not an IT group - a bunch of arts lecturers and student guild type people. And they equated "blocking ports" with "censoring the internet". So absolutely every time we tried to change things, senate voted it down and we were stuck, for many years, with only ports for SMB blocked - every other port was open. To the world. On all our devices. We were allowed firewalls on devices like PCs - but that's not so easy on a printer.
Every morning we had to restart every printer with a HP jet direct (and many times during the day) because it turns out of you port scan an old jet direct, it hangs. We'd also have to leave printer trays open over night, so they couldn't just waste printer paper all night long, printing NIMBDA crap. We used to find that if you installed Windows on a PC or server with the NIC connected, it was literally infected before the installation was complete (truly).