Hijacking Printers For Spamming

[HardOCP News]

Here’s one you might not have heard of, spammers hijacking printers. You heard me right, I said “hijacking printers.” Here’s the lowdown on how it works:

Weaver's research is available in a paper published online. It describes how the attack could be initiated by creating a hidden iframe -- a block of code inserted into a Web page and often served from a different domain than the Web page -- and a Web form that submits the spam message to the printer. An attacker could also send the spam message as a fax, if the printer has fax capabilities.

 

[DeFex]

oh i remember back in the day, when you got a fax spam you replied with a black piece of paper taped in a loop. it would burn out their fax machine.

 

[Exavior]

Wouldn't that burn out yours also?

 

[kent]

Wouldn't that burn out yours also?

Probably not because it's not printing, just transmissing

 

[bigted]

wouldn't it be better to fax something that wasn't blank? then it would have to use ink or whatever. that doesn't sound like a great way to "get them back". what if they have their fax line set to be received as an e-mail? i guess then you'd be spamming their inbox, now who's the spammer, my friend? that's right, it's you

 

[w1retap]

It's better just to use a war dialer and have it set to auto redial every 250ms. But now we have caller ID. lol

 

[DeFex]

wouldn't it be better to fax something that wasn't blank? then it would have to use ink or whatever. that doesn't sound like a great way to "get them back". what if they have their fax line set to be received as an e-mail? i guess then you'd be spamming their inbox, now who's the spammer, my friend? that's right, it's you

i said BLACK not blank

 

[bigted]

i said BLACK not blank

lol "my baad"

 

[DeFex]

now days just get everyone you know to email them your swap file.

 

[SpaceHonkey]

Something else that is waiting to be exploited are the web servers (and many include Java) that most corporate printers have enabled. Imagine a botnet of printers. That could do a lot more damage than just printing spam.

 

[ianken]

LOL.

This reminds me when the first DSL ISP went online in my city. All the customer machines on their network could see each other.

Result: my buddies printing stuff on my printer in the middle of the night. That was fun.