Cybersecurity experts at CyberNews hijacked close to 28,000 unsecured printers worldwide and forced them to print out a guide on printer security.
In order to help as many people as possible secure their devices against potential cyberattacks, the CyberNews security team accessed 27,944 printers around the world and forced the hijacked devices to print out a short 5-step guide on how to secure a printer, with a link to a more detailed version of the guide on our website.
To perform the experiment, we used Internet of Things (IoT) search engines to search for open devices that utilized common printer ports and protocols. After filtering out most of the false positives, we were left with more than 800,000 printers that had network printing features enabled and were accessible over the internet.
After selecting a sample of 50,000 open printers and creating a custom printing script, we managed to print out PDF documents on 27,944 unprotected devices.
