Someone is hacking receipt printers with ‘antiwork’ messages
Hackers are attacking business receipt printers to insert pro-labor messages, according to 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 staff $22 an hour and still manage to sell a Big Mac for less than in America?”, another states.
Numerous similar images have been posted on Reddit, Twitter and elsewhere. The messages vary, but most point readers toward the r/antiwork subreddit that recently became popular during the COVID-19 pandemic, as workers starting demanding more rights.
Some users suggested that the messages were fake, but a cybersecurity firm that monitors the internet told Vice that they’re legit. “Someone is… blast[ing] raw TCP data directly to printer services across the internet,” GreyNoise founder Andrew Morris told Vice. “Basically to every single device that has port TCP 9100 open, and print[ing] a pre-written document that references /r/antiwork with some workers rights/counter capitalist messaging.”
The individual[s] behind the attack are using 25 separate servers, according to Morris, so blocking one IP won’t necessarily stop the attacks. “A technical person is broadcasting print requests for a document containing workers rights messaging to all printers that are misconfigured to be …read more
