Someone is hacking receipt printers with ‘antiwork’ messages

Hackers are attacking enterprise receipt printers to insert pro-labor messages, based on 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 employees $22 an hour and nonetheless handle to promote a Large Mac for lower than in America?”, one other states. 

Quite a few comparable photographs have been posted on Reddit, Twitter and elsewhere. The messages differ, however most level readers towards the r/antiwork subreddit that lately grew to become in style through the COVID-19 pandemic, as employees beginning demanding extra rights.

Some customers steered that the messages have been pretend, however a cybersecurity agency that screens the web advised Vice that they are legit. “Somebody is… blast[ing] uncooked TCP knowledge on to printer companies throughout the web,” GreyNoise founder Andrew Morris advised Vice. “Principally to each single machine that has port TCP 9100 open, and print[ing] a pre-written doc that references /r/antiwork with some employees rights/counter capitalist messaging.”

The person[s] behind the assault are utilizing 25 separate servers, based on Morris, so blocking one IP will not essentially cease the assaults. “A technical individual is broadcasting print requests for a doc containing employees rights messaging to all printers which are misconfigured to be uncovered to the web, and we have confirmed that it’s printing efficiently in some variety of locations,” he stated.

Printers and different internet-connected units will 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, against this, has a way more centered set of targets and messages.