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Prankster teaches companies two important lessons: Pay staff fairly and secure your printers

As the world has tried to navigate the ongoing pandemic in hopes of coming out of it with some modicum of normality preserved, there has been much conversation surrounding the wealthiest of the wealthy.

One of the companies highlighted in these conversations is Amazon and its founder Jeff Bezos. In 2020, Bezos added over $70 billion to his net worth and in 2021 Amazon workers around the world participated in protests to Make Amazon Pay.

We bring all of this up because this morning we spotted something on the sub-Reddit r/antiwork that we can only describe as a prank.

Even describing it as a prank feels like we’re undermining what is happening here.

A post on the sub-Reddit showcased a photo of a page that had been printed out which asked “Are you being underpaid?” and directed the reader to the sub-Reddit.

What appears to be happening is that somebody is scanning the internet looking for vulnerable printers and sending a TCP/IP print request via port 9100. A researcher at GreyNoise has already tagged the event here.

While hijacking printers isn’t new, the message that is being sent by whoever this is, isn’t what we’re used to seeing. Generally, printers are used to spread things nobody wants to see and this time, well, the messages have a point.

https://twitter.com/4b4c41/status/1465506217778941955

The message above that was highlighted on Twitter for instance isn’t especially bad and might help employees who are being underpaid or fear unionising.

However, despite the good intentions of the message, hijacking a printer is ill-advised as we learned when Andrew Auernheimer pushed anti-Semitic and racist messages through printers in 2016.

Is your printer secure?

On Tuesday, F-Secure highlighted security vulnerabilities that it discovered in over 150 HP multifunction printers. Thankfully HP has issued a patch and it’s advised that users patch their systems to address the vulnerabilities. To be clear, these vulnerabilities in HP printers and the incident above are not related to our knowledge.

According to F-Secure, an attacker could infiltrate a network by way of a malicious website that a user unknowingly visited. From there malware scans for printers on the network and prints a file with a special font that would give the attacker code execution rights on the printer.

“It’s easy to forget that modern MFPs are fully-functional computers that threat actors can compromise just like other workstations and endpoints. And just like other endpoints, attackers can leverage a compromised device to damage an organisation’s infrastructure and operations. Experienced threat actors see unsecured devices as opportunities, so organisations that don’t prioritize securing their MFPs like other endpoints leave themselves exposed to attacks like the ones documented in our research,” explains security consultant at F-Secure and one of the people who discovered the vulnerability, Timo Hirvonen.

You can read more about that vulnerability here.

All of this highlights just how important securing every device in your organisation is even your printer. Given many of us are working from home, the same applies especially for routers and security cameras.

Recently a malware variant that looks very similar to Mirai was discovered by AT&T Alien Labs and it could potentially infect 1.9 million IoT devices and nearly 250 000 routers.

Cybercriminals are smart and if it connects to the internet in any way whatsoever, they will try to compromise it.

[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]

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