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Samsung printer attacks

2012-11-27 23:01:57.536429+00 by Dan Lyke 4 comments

US CERT: Vulnerability Note VU#281284 Samsung Printer firmware contains a backdoor administrator account

Woot! Samsung printers and some Dell printers manufactured by Samsung have a hardcoded back-door that allows attacking other devices. Get a hostile machine on your network, even temporarily, it can bootstrap itself to the printer!

Via, Via.

Where's my firewalling traffic-shaping capable Ethernet switch?

[ related topics: broadband ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: made: 2012-11-28 00:06:13.878751+00 by: TheSHAD0W

If you have a NAT router on your connection, that should be enough to prevent external access to the printer.

#Comment Re: made: 2012-11-28 00:49:21.156642+00 by: Dan Lyke

Yeah, there's lots of reasons to firewall inbound connections. This is one of those situations where if a compromised machine gets on your local network, it could compromise other machines on that network.

Call me paranoid, but given that we occasionally have houseguests with Windows machines, and I haven't created a secondary firewall inside the house and shop networks (and may even want to give them access to printers), I worry about stuff like this.

But even more than that, we're seeing a larger trend where we can't trust vendors to do the right thing with hardware. From the some good sides and some bad sides issues inherent in things like TRO69 to the possibilities that vendors are deploying deliberate backdoors in other devices based on "national security" interests.

#Comment Re: made: 2012-11-28 14:49:37.431147+00 by: TheSHAD0W

Some of the new Linksys routers have the ability to create a second "guest" wifi network that is separated from the main wifi and LAN subnet.

#Comment Re: made: 2012-11-28 16:22:45.876296+00 by: Dan Lyke

Yeah, I've got an always-on Linux box in the house anyway, I could probably set up it and a secondary WiFi card as an additional internal network. I'd like to have an open WiFi network anyway, so this is something I'm thinking about... casually, on top of all of my other possible projects...