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Twitter user hacks 50k printers to tell people to subscribe to PewDiePie
- reshie 8y agoah distinct IP's that can not be distinguished as proxies. suppose this goes to the iot as apposed to zombie computers.
- classichasclass 8y agoThe April Fool's joke that nearly got me fired was a combination of easily accessible JetAdmin ports, an HP control sequence, a script to find every JetAdmin on the internal network and a distinct lack of common sense. But it was so worth it. So worth it.
- tyingq 8y agoIf you sent an old DEC band printer a bunch of form feeds, the tractor feed paper would shoot out about 10 feet. Fun to time it when someone walked behind the printer.
- rixrax 8y agoMany years a go in college, on some course one guy created a postscript file that when printed reprogrammed HP printer(s?) of the time to add one (1) zero to every number on documents that were subsequently printed.
- devbug 8y agoAll fun and games until you accidentally commit fraud.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago> accidentally commit fraud. That isn't a thing. Fraud is deliberate deception. You can not commit accidental deliberate deception.
- leereeves 8y agoTrue, but you can still be found guilty of fraud even so.
- ryan-c 8y agoWas that the control sequence that changed the text on the printer's character LCD screen?
- classichasclass 8y agoYep, the one changing the "ready" message.
- joeblau 8y agoWe had a co-worker that would mess with that stuff. He would change the text to say things like "Free cats inside" and "Insert clear paper." I took a bunch of pictures on my Treo650, but they are archived right now.
- pcdoodle 8y agoI miss the Treo...
- Twirrim 8y agoI worked for a smaller company for a few years, as one of only two sysadmins. We used to regularly mess about with the messages on the printers, see how long it took people to notice. I started out with the almost obligatory "Out of Cheese Error"
- felipemnoa 8y agoAnybody have any idea if bots (or fake accounts) are involved in increasing the subscription count?
- inawarminister 8y agoI've heard of rumours of T-Series, the challenger, got their subscribers count steadily moving up when YouTube was down globally earlier this month, which indicates botting, but what do we know? It's all foggy under Google's algorithms. [0] https://mobile.twitter.com/socialblade/status/1052375424616030209?lang=en https://mobile.twitter.com/socialblade/status/10523754246160...
- RandomInteger4 8y agoMost of T-Series' subscribers come from people creating accounts in India and getting automatically subscribed to T-Series by YouTube's algorithms. YouTube did this a while back with other demographics. For instance, CaptainSparklez often mentions this as one of the reasons why he became big; i.e. YouTube was autosubscribing folks to certain creators. EDIT: If I recall correctly, when you create a new YouTube account, they give you a list of channel suggestions that you can check off to bootstrap you into suggestions based on your preferences, so this could be that, meaning people just "select all".
- drannex 8y agoUsually they are automatically checked off, and you have to manually uncheck every single one. Almost the same thing.
- keketi 8y agoOne Pewdiepie fan created a USB device that automatically unsubscribes from T-Series when plugged in: https://www.reddit.com/r/PewdiepieSubmissions/comments/a0ldpi/i_made_a_script_that_unsubs_to_tseries_when/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PewdiepieSubmissions/comments/a0ldp... Here's one that auto-subscribes to Pewdiepie: https://www.reddit.com/r/PewdiepieSubmissions/comments/a0wcdb/just_saw_that_guy_who_made_a_unsubscribe_from/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PewdiepieSubmissions/comments/a0wcd... Source code: https://github.com/Alone2/SubscribeToPewdsScript/blob/master/digiPew.ino https://github.com/Alone2/SubscribeToPewdsScript/blob/master...
- arkadiyt 8y ago"Hacked" = people left their printers open to the internet.
- cpsempek 8y agoIdentical actions of another can result in my car being stolen whether I leave it locked or unlocked.
- Dylan16807 8y ago> The same action of another can result in my car being stolen whether I leave it locked or unlocked. Taking advantage of a car being unlocked involves completely different actions than with a locked car, so no, not at all. (And as far as stealing the car goes, a non-hack involves leaving the keys in it too.) If you walked through an open door to steal something, it won't be "breaking and entering" either.
- ehnto 8y agoIt would be burgulary instead of breaking and entering. You still get charged, just like accessing a computer unlawfully doesn't have to involve clever tricks to be illegal.
- ChrisLomont 8y agoThat’s criminal trespass. Accessing something not yours, when the owner has some expectation of you not accessing it, even if easy to do, is often illegal. Owners not locking goods down does not give another the right to access.
- Dylan16807 8y agoYep! And nobody should accuse you of picking the lock!
- mirimir 8y agoSure, but that doesn't mean that it was "hacked", either. This is lots closer to calling unlisted telephones.
- gregmac 8y agoThe only thing surprising about this is that these printers hadn't already printed enough random garbage to get disconnected/firewalled off from the internet. The number of printers from a simple search [1] that have no authentication is staggering. [1] https://www.shodan.io/search?query=printer https://www.shodan.io/search?query=printer
- HarryHirsch 8y agoThat was astounding already 20 years ago. Fax spam was out of control then to such a degree that Congress roused itself to pass legislation with teeth, yet it occurred to no one to send printer spam. The only thing that would connect to our printers was viruses, the probable target was port 631 with buggy CUPS or other LPD daemon behind, because every few hours the printer would run off a page with just a few gibberish letters.
- OnlyRepliesToBS 8y agothat justifies the spam
- anon2775 8y agoMany organizations are in dire need of departmental NAT firewalls and VPN solutions. I had to beg, bitch and moan before a Pac10 uni would offer such a service to protect our users.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y agoWhat would they need NAT for?
- BenjiWiebe 8y agoActually all it takes is a firewall. As far as hiding hosts goes, a firewall is just as good as NAT. And then if you do need a host or two accessible, the firewall is easier to change than the NAT.
- philliphaydon 8y agoNever new that guy was so popular... I don’t really understand why. But damn that’s some dedication by fans to boost his subscriber count...
- elwell 8y agoMore so just the teenage angst driving a 19 year old to leave his mark on the world with a public prank
- eksemplar 8y agoIt’s really silly to ruin your life with a criminal record like this, but at least the guy did something useful with his fandom. A lot of kids on YouTube are just watching, wasting away.
- petercooper 8y agoA lot of (adults) on (Netflix) are just watching, wasting away.
- birracerveza 8y agoA lot of (people) on (television) are just watching, wasting away. So at the end of the day we learned that nothing ever really changed.
- riffraff 8y agoMy mother objected to me spending too much time reading and not enough outside. I imagine there were people in the stone age that objected to people wasting too much time near the fire and not enough fighting with sabertooth tigers.
- heronymus 8y agoExactly that! When I was living on the street, we used to call the fire "stoneage-tv". Because the human brains have such a long history of staring "into" the fire, I have the mild suspicion, that reading on e-ink displays without a backlight might make it less likely to get lost in thoughts, than when staring on a "glowing" screen. Unfortunately the only competetive screens are still rather expensive (paperlike).. ..damn, I got lost in offtopic thoughts again! ; )
- Rjevski 8y agoI am really surprised these kinds of printer "hacks" are still possible in 2018.
- saagarjha 8y agoI'm sure much of the software running on the printer is older than I am, no matter how new the printer itself is.
- wu-ikkyu 8y agoWhy are you so surprised?
- Rjevski 8y agoIn this day and age I would've expected any non-secured printer to be flooded by spam on a continuous basis, to the point where they have to be secured if you don't want them to run out of paper printing spam every single day. I'm surprised that these companies managed to get by with non-secure printers without being overwhelmed by spam.
- tempodox 8y agoAre you kidding? IoT stuff doesn't have any security either, and it wasn't invented 100 years ago.
- squarefoot 8y agoTrue although there are previous technologies enabling home appliances to be connected and controlled from outside through radio and telephone couplers. X10 which dates back to the mid 70s is probably the most famous one. Back then there were no such things as encryption protocols: if someone knew your air conditioner was connected to your phone line he could turn it on just by phoning to your home and sending the right tone over the line. Hacking was just a matter of time spent finding the right frequencies; no firewall to prevent anyone from trying a thousand times until someone would hopefully notice and pull the cord. Despite those "vulnerabilities" though, I never heard about abusing other peoples devices. I would be interested in hearing experiences from actual owners (or hackers:) of those old systems.
- pugworthy 8y agoI work at a large printer company - similar name to a famous fantasy novel series. I have joked for ages about "Denial of Ink and Paper" attacks. To co-workers: I told you so.
- joatmon-snoo 8y agoIt's even got a Wikipedia entry! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_fax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_fax
- mprev 8y agoI thought Twitter might somehow be pertinent to the hack but, apparently, this person just happens to have a Twitter account.
- navinsylvester 8y agoWe all know youtubers will go to any length to grab subscribers but the way pewdiepie is doing the campaign has left a very bad taste. He started to drag India and even released a diss track, made it look like its T-Series/India vs rest of the world. I think its a deliberate ploy to drag India since he can pull more subscribers that way. There are lot of live count stream tracking the subscribers between pewdiepie vs T-Series. On the chat i could see lot of hate from these kids like lets beat up Indian kids on school & lot of ethnic hate. I know these are something you can't avoid in Internet and best to ignore. But i can't help but feel bad for Indian kids living abroad since most of his subscribers are kids/teens and they can be easily influenced by these sort of campaigns. We can't blame pewdiepie nor expect him to act mature even though he has more than 70 million subscribers. But youtube needs to have some sort of policy on subscriber campaigns to avoid these type of scenarios. If not for all at least for influential youtubers.
- Klover 8y agoI have no idea what you’re saying, sorry.
- navinsylvester 8y agoWith great power comes great responsibility and if that is not the case we need a system to keep it under check.
- ninni 8y agoIt's largely perceived more as pewdiepie an independent creator vs Tseries a large faceless music label. Expecting this to cause ethnic hate seems far fetched. It's mostly about preventing youtube from being taken over by corporations.
- navinsylvester 8y agoI would love to support independent creators than corporations but wish he didn't hate the country the record label belonged to. Here is couple of lines from his diss track: You tryna dethrone me from spot on number one But you India, you lose so best think you haven't won > Tseries a large faceless music label Just because you haven't heard doesn't mean its a faceless music label so please educate yourself. I am not a fan of this music label but bollywood produces more movies than hollywood and almost all of it are musicals. I am not in anyway saying bollywood is better but saying this just for the sheer volume.
- jjuhl 8y agoIf I was subscribed to that guys YouTube channel (which I'm not, since the guy is an idiot), someone pulling a stunt like this would probably prompt me to unsubscribe.
- hi41 8y agoHow was this done? I think of Twitter messages as something you can view in the app or browser. How can you send a message to the printer from there? Can someone please explain.
- bobcat9 8y agoTry reading the story and not just the headline.
- krylon 8y agoA number of years back, I was trying to learn about network programming and SQL and decided to try and build a a kind of randomized port scanner that would generate IP addresses randomly, then scan semi-random ports on those that were pingable, and finally store the results in a database. I quickly found a couple (not a lot, but I was kind of shocked to find any) of printers that were totally exposed to the Internet. While I can proudly say I even resisted the temptation to make them print out something clever like "Wer das liest, ist doof", I figured it was only a matter of time before somebody with less self-restraint would come along. At work, all our printers still respond to the default passwords one can so easily find on the Internet, but at least they are not reachable from the outside. Printers are not considered a security problem, because once someone is on our internal network, they could do much worse things. But still, exposing them to random people on the Internet is begging for something like this to happen.