Hackers are attacking enterprise receipt printers to insert pro-labor messages, in keeping with a report from Vice and posts on Reddit. “Are you being underpaid?”, reads one message and “How can the McDonald’s in Denmark pay their staff $22 an hour and still manage to sell a Big Mac for less than in America?”, one other states.
Numerous comparable photos have been posted on Reddit, Twitter and elsewhere. The messages range, however most level readers towards the r/antiwork subreddit that lately turned fashionable through the COVID-19 pandemic, as employees beginning demanding extra rights.
Some customers urged that the messages have been pretend, however a cybersecurity agency that screens the web instructed Vice that they are legit. “Someone is… blast[ing] raw TCP data directly to printer services across the internet,” GreyNoise founder Andrew Morris instructed Vice. “Basically to every single device that has port TCP 9100 open, and print[ing] a pre-written document that references /r/antiwork with some workers rights/counter capitalist messaging.”
The particular person[s] behind the assault are utilizing 25 separate servers, in keeping with Morris, so blocking one IP will not essentially cease the assaults. “A technical person is broadcasting print requests for a document containing workers rights messaging to all printers that are misconfigured to be exposed to the internet, and we’ve confirmed that it is printing successfully in some number of places,” he mentioned.
Printers and different internet-connected gadgets might be notoriously insecure. In 2018, a hacker hijacked 50,000 printers with a message telling folks to subscribe to PewDiePie, of all of the random issues. The receipt printer hack, in contrast, has a way more centered set of targets and messages.
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