A hacker claiming he had an altruistic reason pwned 150,000 printers last weekend forcing them to spew out unwanted print jobs.
The hacker who goes by the name Stackoverflowin told BleepingComputer that he wrote as script that searched for open printer ports and then sent printed out a print job all in order to teach people to not leave printers exposed online.
What he forced printers to generate a short note and an ASCII image. Part of the note stated “For the love of God, please close this port, skid” and a link to a Twitter handle, according to BleepingComputer.
Stackoverflowin's script hit printers with Internet Printing Protocol ports, Line Printer Deamon ports and port 9100 left open to external connections. A remote code execution vulnerability was then exploited to take over the printers.
