As described in a recent post, they found around 800,000 printers exposed to the internet, unsecured, on IoT search engines. They found these printers ‘network-enabled’ and ‘accessible over the internet’.
As stated in their post,
We searched for IP addresses with open ports on specialized IoT search engines, such as Shodan and Censys. While performing the search, we made sure that the open devices we found were actual printers, as opposed to unrelated services that simply used those ports for other purposes.Though not all of them might be vulnerable, the researchers could still target 500,000 of these.
Consequently, they aimed at 50,000 printers and could successfully force printing on 27,944 of them. They selected these printers based on location, manufacturer, and protocols used for accessing the printers.
Briefly, they designed a custom script that typically targeted the printers’ printing process, leaving any other features. As they executed the script, they could trigger the target printers to print their 5-step printer security guide.
Elaborating on this dangerous problem, the researchers stated that criminal hackers may hijack such unsecured printers to exfiltrate data. Also, they can include the printers into botnets to perform DDoS attacks. Or, such attacks may also lead to ransomware attacks and more.
Some manufacturers continue working on making their printers secure. For example, in 2018, HP announced a bug bounty program aiming at its printer security. However, organizations as well as individual users also need to pay attention to this matter.
Some of the measures users can apply to protect their printers, as explained by CyberNews, include,
