These messages directed their recipients to the r/antiwork subreddit, which gained attention during the Covid-19 pandemic when workers started advocating for more rights.
According to a report by Vice and a post on Reddit, hackers are controlling business receipt printers to spread information that supports labor.
Screenshots posted on Reddit and Twitter reveal some of this information. “Do you have a low salary?” a message asked. Another wrote: “How can McDonald’s in Denmark pay its employees $22 an hour while still selling Big Macs at a price lower than that in the United States? Answer: union!”
Although the messages posted online vary, they all have a pro-labor sentiment. Many people took their recipients to the r/antiwork subreddit, which was obtained during the Covid-19 pandemic when workers started advocating for more rights. Attention.
Many Reddit users praised the receipt hacker, one user called it “funny”, and some users questioned the authenticity of the message. But a cybersecurity company that monitors the Internet told Vice that the news was legal. “Someone… sends raw TCP data directly to a printer service on the Internet,” said Andrew Morris, founder of GreyNoise. “Basically every device that opens the TCP 9100 port and prints [ing] a pre-written document that quotes /r/antiwork and some workers’ rights/anti-capitalism messages.”
Morris also said that this is a complicated operation-no matter who is behind it, 25 independent servers are used, so blocking an IP address is not necessarily enough to block the message. “A technician is broadcasting a print request for a file containing workers’ rights messages to all printers that are misconfigured to be exposed on the Internet,” Morris continued.
Printers and other networked devices are vulnerable to attacks; hackers are good at exploiting insecure things. In 2018, a hacker took control of 50,000 printers to promote the controversial influencer PewDiePie.
Post time: Dec-20-2021
