A Hacker Just Pwned Over 150,000 Printers Exposed Online (bleepingcomputer.com)

Last year an attacker forced thousands of unsecured printers to spew racist and anti-semitic messages. But this year's attack is even bigger. An anonymous reader writes: A grey-hat hacker going by the name of Stackoverflowin has pwned over 150,000 printers that have been left accessible online. For the past 24 hours, Stackoverflowin has been running an automated script that searches for open printer ports and sends a rogue print job to the target's device. The script targets IPP (Internet Printing Protocol) ports, LPD (Line Printer Daemon) ports, and port 9100 left open to external connections. From high-end multi-functional printers at corporate headquarters to lowly receipt printers in small town restaurants, all have been affected. The list includes brands such as Afico, Brother, Canon, Epson, HP, Lexmark, Konica Minolta, Oki, and Samsung.

The printed out message included recommendations for printer owners to secure their device. The hacker said that people who reached out were very nice and thanked him.
The printers apparently spew out an ASCII drawing of a robot, along with the words "stackoverflowin the hacker god has returned. your printer is part of a flaming botnet... For the love of God, please close this port." The messages sometimes also include a link to a Twitter feed named LMAOstack.

Comments

Re:Botnet?

[haruchai]

Remember when fax machines printed immediately so that anyone in the world could waste a few sheets of your paper?
We didn't consider that a security issue either.

A few sheets? Ever heard of the Black Fax Attack?
Pranksters used to loop black construction paper through fax machines so that the recipient would run out of toner or have their machine gummed up real good.

Read the latest research in printer security?

[l1404223]

Using a public printer to "print" is the least evil thing you can do. Read this weeks research on printer security: http://hacking-printers.net/ https://github.com/RUB-NDS/PRE... Whenever you can print a document on a printer (for example, using port 9100 or cross-site-printing from a malicious website) you can do much worse stuff like: - Capture print jobs (all PostScript printers since 32 years are vulnerable!) - Access the file system (most PostScript printers allow this, some PJL devices do) - Dump the printer's NVRAM or memory ("feature" of all Brother laser printers and some Xerox devices) - Obtain credentials for Scan-to-Mail, Active Directory etc. stored on the device (Brother, OKI, some HPs, ...) - Install new firmware on the device (modification however is difficult as many vendors use code-signing) - Destroy the printer's NVRAM using legitimate PJL commands (various HP, Brother, Lexmark, Dell, Konica Minolta, ...)