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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.
"Ironically, the hacker is a former Jew"
Is an African American who develops a bizarre hatred of African Americans suddenly no longer black?
Is a white man who believes that whites are responsible for all the evil in the world suddenly Native American?
He can disavow Judaism - plenty of Jews do it. They're called "secular Jews." They're still Jews, and he is, too.
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
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).
Neo-communist? The McCarthyites have come out in full force ever since Bernie started his run. I still haven't figured out if the communist label is out of laziness or stupidity.
Time makes more converts than reason
"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.
From the email I received last week:
"The University’s Office of Equal Opportunity and Access and Bias Response Team are investigating hateful anti-Semitic fliers that were sent Friday, March 25, to several networked print and FAX devices. Other universities across the country also have reported receiving similar fliers."
I'd be much more impressed if they had IT investigating.