Our printers are being hacked

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Patrick

Three of our HP printers are being hacked. They are network printers
with static IP addresses. Over night all three printers went through 500
pages of paper each with one to four lines of ASCII characters printed
at the top of each page. Has anyone dealt with this before? Any ideas or
suggestions on how to keep the printers from being accosted?

Thanks,
Patrick
 
Patrick said:
Three of our HP printers are being hacked. They are network printers
with static IP addresses. Over night all three printers went through 500
pages of paper each with one to four lines of ASCII characters printed
at the top of each page. Has anyone dealt with this before? Any ideas or
suggestions on how to keep the printers from being accosted?

Thanks,
Patrick
Click to expand...
Sounds like a virus - will check with our sysadmin tomorrow morning. We
had this problem about 2 years ago - check your AV software.

JimH
 
Three of our HP printers are being hacked. They are network printers
with static IP addresses. Over night all three printers went through 500
pages of paper each with one to four lines of ASCII characters printed
at the top of each page. Has anyone dealt with this before? Any ideas or
suggestions on how to keep the printers from being accosted?

Thanks,
Patrick
Click to expand...

Yes, purchase a firewall. Try Outpost - www.agnitum.com.
 
Patrick said:
Three of our HP printers are being hacked. They are network printers with
static IP addresses. Over night all three printers went through 500 pages of
paper each with one to four lines of ASCII characters printed at the top of
each page. Has anyone dealt with this before? Any ideas or suggestions on how
to keep the printers from being accosted?
Click to expand...

This may be due to the Bugbear or some other virus/Worm. The following have
some discussions:
http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=77719 and
http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/tanatos.shtml

Regards,
Bob Headrick, not speaking for my employer HP
MS MVP Printing/Imaging
 
Don't overlook the possibility of benign error. If I shut of my home
printer during a printout, and then turn it back on, I can get page
after page after page of a few lines of ASCII junk until I turn the
printer off.

Or if you select one type of printer in software, and send the print
to another type, same ASCII junk.

Seems that if the printer doesn't have the first few characters in the
header, it just defaults to ASCII.

Hackers in your network just messing with printers seems far-fetched.

John W
 
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