Spam printing proof-of-concept revealed
Lack of security allows websites to send spammish content to network printers.
Opening your inbox on a Monday morning and finding out that it's full of spam is bad enough already, but what if you find your network printer has been printing pages full of spammish content? According to security researcher Aaron Weaver this could become reality.
In an article published for the website Help Net Security, Weaver shows how a website containing a simple POST request to port 9100, the standard port for most printers, will send a text message to the printer. Moreover, using JavaScript and the fact that most printers accept commands in the PostScript language, it is possible to format the page that is being printed and make it look any way you want. In some cases, it might even be possible to use these techniques to send spam through faxes.
Although this kind of attack has yet to be seen in the wild, system administrators are advised to follow Weaver's suggestions to secure their printer environment: to always have an administrator password set on a printer and to restrict access to the printer so that it only accepts jobs from a centralised printing server.
14 January 2008
Tags:
printing, spam.
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