Hackers take control of 160,000 printers

Hackers usually aren’t playing pranks, but this one did by taking over 160,000 plus printers across the Internet. The purpose? To make ASCII art and send a warning. The hacker told The Register that it was “Kind of an impulse.”

The hacker in question is the infamous Stackoverflowing, who stated that he wrote a script to find insecure public-facing devices with Internet Printing Protocol aka IPP, RAW and Line Printer Remote Services that run on network ports 9100, 631 and 515.

After testing their program out and netting in some 50,000 devices as a result, Stack stopped his script before things got too serious, as most people seemed willing to laugh it off. However, there are some individuals out there that have been using similar scripts to ask for Bitcoin ransoms and make money off of unsecured devices in similar fashion.

Stack claims to have done it as an impulse and just because he had a general interest in the idea of messing with printers but it remains a serious warning to others out there with cybersecurity issues.