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from the think-of-all-the-wasted-paper dept.
A grey-hat hacker going by the name of Stackoverflowin says he's pwned over 150,000 printers that have been left accessible online.
Speaking to Bleeping Computer, the hacker says he wanted to raise everyone's awareness towards the dangers of leaving printers exposed online without a firewall or other security settings enabled.
For the past 24 hours, Stackoverflowin has been running an automated script that he wrote himself, which searches for open printer ports and sends a rogue print job to the target's device.
From high-end multi-functional printers at corporate headquarters to lowly receipt printers in small town restaurants, all have been affected.
Users reported multiple printer models as affected. The list includes brands such as Afico, Brother, Canon, Epson, HP, Lexmark, Konica Minolta, Oki, and Samsung.
Stackoverflowin told Bleeping Computer that his script targets printing devices that have IPP (Internet Printing Protocol) ports, LPD (Line Printer Daemon) ports, and port 9100 left open to external connections.
The script also includes an exploit that uses a remote code execution vulnerability to target Dell Xeon printers. "This allowed me to inject PostScript and invoke rouge[sic] jobs," Stackoverflowin told Bleeping about the RCE vulnerability's role.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 06 2017, @09:27PM
Do printers normally just open ports up? How does this work with NAT? Are people configuring their printers with admin rights to their firewall/router devices?
I am not really sure how this is working, unless they run the install CD and just let the wizard do everything.
I had to type in my initial settings into the front panel, and then later update them from an internal web server on the printer... I guess DHCP would have worked, but the disk only had drivers and firmware and advertisements for printer add-ons and toner...
I remember HP printers updating their own firmware, but that was via a wget or ftp process, not opening ports on a firewall. Someone has to give the printer the power to do this to their network hardware, or run software that does it for them. I wouldn't have thought standards between consumer devices were so similar that a printer setup wizard could do this across a swath of consumer devices. I guess then that the difference is in the packaging and they all suck the same way, but the the cosmetics differ and what you pay for based on its looks differ?