Antiwork Activists are spamming printers with their materials

[rcmaehl]

Summary

Antiwork activists are spamming misconfigured printers with their pamphlets and other materials

 

Media

Quotes

Quote

Businesses in the US and abroad are being spammed with 'antiwork'... delivered through... printers. Prompting workers to unionize, refuse 'poverty wages,' and ask for more pay. Workers on Twitter and Reddit have posted several pictures showing the rebellious message 'ARE YOU BEING UNDERPAID? You have a protected LEGAL RIGHT to discuss your pay with your coworkers. POVERTY WAGES only exist because people are 'willing to work for them,' read one of the messages in a print receipt. The receipts directed workers to the r/antiwork subreddit, an online forum where users participate, comment and share. The subreddit has since gained momentum, with users sharing their own theories about the messages printed on receipts. A cybersecurity analyst told VICE that network traffic going to insecure... printers indicates one or more... are indeed behind the attack. 'Which one of you is doing this because it's hilarious,' a Reddit user who claimed that a message had been printed at his job, wrote on Reddit on Tuesday. 'Me and my coworker need answers.' One of the messages reportedly printed in a receipt read: 'RIDDLE ME THIS. How can McDonald's in Denmark manage to pay their staff $22 an hour and still sell a Big Mac for less than in America? Answer: UNIONS! Did you know it is a rather simple task to organize an UNION?'  The messages appear to have been sent indiscriminately. 'Someone is using a similar technique as 'mass scanning' to massively blast raw TCP data directly to printer services across the internet,' he said. 'Basically to every single device that has port TCP 9100 open and prints a pre-written document that references /r/antiwork with some workers rights/counter capitalist messaging.'  In 2020, cybersecurity experts... hijacked almost 28,000 unsecured printers worldwide to highlight how easy it is to hack them. Of the 50,000 devices..., 27,944 were successfully accessed. '...We can presume that out of 800,000 internet-connected printers across the world, at least 447,000 are unsecured.'

 

My Thoughts

It just goes to show the security for all devices is important. We've seen this before during Pewdiepie vs T-Series in which Chromecasts and once again printers were easily exploited. A common issue is people having UPNP enabled on their routers, usually by default that causes the printers to be exposed to the internet. In a work environment, it's even more important as insecure printers can be used as a launching point for more advanced and serious attacks as seen with the Stuxnet attack and talked about in detail at Blackhat conventions

 

Sources

Gizmodo

Futurism

Dailymail (quote source)

Edited December 9, 2021 by rcmaehl
Removed strikethrough caused by IPS bug

[AbydosOne]

31 minutes ago, rcmaehl said:

Antiwork activists

I don't think they're "anti-work" so much as "pro-employee/pro-union".

[Brooksie359]

8 minutes ago, AbydosOne said:

I don't think they're "anti-work" so much as "pro-employee/pro-union".

Usually the two are different though. It's definitely not good to confuse the two and sometimes they are kinda both as with bad working conditions some are not gonna want to work which sorta makes sense. Things that try and improve those conditions are usually something they would likely approve of. Then there are some who simply don't want to work period but that seems rare to me. I would get so bored if I didn't have work to do. Sure it's nice to not work for awhile but it gets boring pretty fast at least that was my experience while unemployed due to covid layoffs. 

[BobVonBob]

About the attack, people don't secure their internet connected devices, color me shocked.

 

About the contents of it, big fan. I've got no issues with my current employer, I work with great people, do interesting things, bosses that treat us with respect, and according to some folks that have been there much longer than I have, raises that keep up with industry wage growth, which is a surprisingly rare thing. Past employers have been a very different story. I've seen many of the people around me, especially in jobs considered "unskilled", being basically exploited. A lot of them were poor adults with multiple children and multiple jobs and didn't have the time to get the experience necessary for a better job. They couldn't risk holding out for a better offer, because not getting this job meant not being able to make rent. Kept on the cusp of part-time so they couldn't get benefits, lower pay, you name it. Just before I left a high school job at a big box store I found out that a few of my coworkers were making almost $2 an hour less than I was for positions with way more work than I had, and even I wasn't being paid all that much, $12.50 an hour or thereabouts. A union would be great for them, but of course it's bad for business so any thoughts of unionizing must be brutally crushed.

 

 

Totally off-topic, but does anyone else see the tweet flickering between having and not having a scroll bar? It seems like it's just long enough to need a scroll bar, but the scroll bar appearing causes it to shrink and not need a scroll bar, and when the scroll bar goes away it gets bigger again, and thus continues the circle of life.

[Heliian]

If they can get our printers to work remotely then they're hired.  

[rcmaehl]

8 minutes ago, BobVonBob said:

Totally off-topic, but does anyone else see the tweet flickering between having and not having a scroll bar? It seems like it's just long enough to need a scroll bar, but the scroll bar appearing causes it to shrink and not need a scroll bar, and when the scroll bar goes away it gets bigger again, and thus continues the circle of life.

Yep. Probably an IPS bug. 

[Zodiark1593]

Wonder if they’re printing white on black background? Just to suck down that toner. 

[Jtalk4456]

8 minutes ago, Zodiark1593 said:

Wonder if they’re printing white on black background? Just to suck down that toner. 

They're doing white on black background, but they're turning off greyscale so it makes black with all of the other colors and uses 3x the toner XD

3 hours ago, Heliian said:

If they can get our printers to work remotely then they're hired.  

Yeah, I've worked with printers long enough to know how true that is. 

For a brief period I found this image and sent this to unsecured printers I found for fun. 

[Lightwreather]

6 hours ago, BobVonBob said:

Totally off-topic, but does anyone else see the tweet flickering between having and not having a scroll bar? It seems like it's just long enough to need a scroll bar, but the scroll bar appearing causes it to shrink and not need a scroll bar, and when the scroll bar goes away it gets bigger again, and thus continues the circle of life.

Absolutely same thing happening here

[Eaglerino]

8 hours ago, AbydosOne said:

I don't think they're "anti-work" so much as "pro-employee/pro-union".

may have started off that way but it's now definitely just people who want everything provided for them while they sit and do nothing

[Sauron]

Ok, that's very funny  if you're a sysadmin beware your own printers... or don't, this stuff helps you too...

[Kisai]

9 hours ago, BobVonBob said:

About the attack, people don't secure their internet connected devices, color me shocked.

 

People haven't been securing their printers since the 90's, when they first found their way onto the internet. Hell there are plenty of HP Jetdirect laserjet III's and later that are exposed to the internet because they were just plugged into the first ethernet cable found in the office.

 

Here's the thing, and I'd suggest this in both enterprise and personal printers, take the dang printer off the "computer" network. Put it behind a proper print server, otherwise connect it via USB only.

 

The problem is that many "home" printers end in offices for secure prints, and they end up in default configurations rather than being connected only to the PC it's used by. Hell the office I was doing work for, had three such printers, and I made a point of disabling the jetdirect on the two that were only connected to one machine. The third was shared by a few people in that corner of the building. Everyone else used the Xerox devices.

 

Which reminds me. Good grief there are seemingly no Xerox people in BC. It's one thing to sell/lease your printer kit to businesses, but it's an entirely other animal when you need support for it, and nobody knows the admin password.

 

[suicidalfranco]

The last thing I'll do in my life is take work advise from commies. 

Underpaid? *checks last paycheck* lol nope

Asking for more money? Almost a yearly occurrence for me. If I feel like I'm not getting what I think I'm worth, I just start looking elsewhere.

Poverty wages exist because people believe that a job interview is a one sided discussion. As linus mentioned a couple of times in his vids, communication is the most important of skills in life.

 

Anyway, I think I've found the perfect workplace (both in terms of cash and the people I work with) after changing job so many times. It may be the hill I'll stick with till the end, or till I decide to finally open my own bar and be done with programming for good.

[Rauten]

15 minutes ago, suicidalfranco said:

The last thing I'll do in my life is take work advise from commies.

Underpaid? *checks last paycheck* lol nope

Asking for more money? Almost a yearly occurrence for me. If I feel like I'm not getting what I think I'm worth, I just start looking elsewhere.

So, because what they're saying doesn't apply to you, they're automatically commies? Or worthless advice?

If your current employment situation is great, hey, happy for you; but don't assume it applies to everyone.

15 minutes ago, suicidalfranco said:

Poverty wages exist because people believe that a job interview is a one sided discussion. As linus mentioned a couple of times in his vids, communication is the most important of skills in life.

Sometimes, unfortunately, it kinda is. If you don't have a job and you urgently need something, anything, to at least try to make ends meet, you take whatever you can get.

 

15 minutes ago, suicidalfranco said:

Anyway, I think I've found the perfect workplace (both in terms of cash and the people I work with) after changing job so many times.

And that's another reason to grab a job, any job, when you don't have one. 
When you go to an interview and you're already working, it gives you some more negotiation power. "You don't want to hire me? Oh well, I'll just go back to my current job". You don't have as much on the line.

[Dracarris]

1 hour ago, Rauten said:

And that's another reason to grab a job, any job, when you don't have one. 
When you go to an interview and you're already working, it gives you some more negotiation power. "You don't want to hire me? Oh well, I'll just go back to my current job". You don't have as much on the line.

It's also a question of the field you are in. Skilled IT or EE person? Oh yeah you will easily find a job. Unfortunately many peeps just don't have what it takes to master those and end up in fields where the supply of workers is much higher than suitable jobs.

[ravenshrike]

14 hours ago, AbydosOne said:

I don't think they're "anti-work" so much as "pro-employee/pro-union".

What they are is thieves. They're stealing toner and time, both of the people waiting for the printer and those that have to replace the toner cartridge.

[rcmaehl]

3 minutes ago, ravenshrike said:

What they are is thieves. They're stealing toner and time, both of the people waiting for the printer and those that have to replace the toner cartridge.

The average medium use printer toner is $80 and is good for 15,000 to 20,000 pages. Assuming they're printing 10 pages a day they a wasting $0.04 - $0.053 in toner. Last I checked they weren't absolutely spamming every printer. Just a few pages here and there.

[cj09beira]

2 hours ago, Rauten said:

So, because what they're saying doesn't apply to you, they're automatically commies? Or worthless advice?

If your current employment situation is great, hey, happy for you; but don't assume it applies to everyone.

Sometimes, unfortunately, it kinda is. If you don't have a job and you urgently need something, anything, to at least try to make ends meet, you take whatever you can get.

 

And that's another reason to grab a job, any job, when you don't have one. 
When you go to an interview and you're already working, it gives you some more negotiation power. "You don't want to hire me? Oh well, I'll just go back to my current job". You don't have as much on the line.

more likely that he got to that conclusion from the fact that it came from /r/antiwork, and that they think unions are the solution 

[SansVarnic]

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