Office printers spew reams of garbage as 2-year-old Trojan runs wild Computer printers around the world are spewing garbage following a flare-up of a strain of malware first detected two years ago, Symantec warns. A spike in infections by the Milicenso Trojan has hit businesses in the US, India, Europe and South America over the last two weeks or so – resulting in a massive, wasted print jobs …
25 years ago when I was working on a site that used a mainframe based internal email system in a company that boasted of it's paperless office, I never understood why one of the managers printed all his email
Until I discovered that printing an email left it marked unread (you could see if an email you sent was read).
clueless managers, no, they only want you to think they are clueless, devious bastards is a better description
A printer is a machine for producing scrap paper.
A mono laser printer is a machine for producing lots of scrap paper very quickly.
An inkjet printer is a machine for producing very expensive scrap paper.
A colour laser printer is a machine for producing lots of very expensive scrap paper very quickly.
Seriously, we had something like this way back in the Windows 98 days, as some malware tried to spread around the network by copying itself to any shared device it could find -- without bothering to distinguish between disks and printers.
The telltale indication that it was actually malware, and not someone switching on the printer after sending a print job (thus causing the "graphics mode" instruction at the beginning to be missed, and the binary data representing pixels to be mistaken for ASCII text and control characters) was the text "This program cannot be run in DOS mode" somewhere near the top of the first page.
Binary file? Why a Binary file?
I remmember one PFY who worked for me who created a report on the mainframe from the engineering system parts catalog.
Every thing was fine until all the parts begining with the number '1' were printed, '1' being the ansi control character for a form feed.
Big report!
Well, in my ancient career in graphic design, I've certainly generated a pantload of really expensive full-color waste paper -- uh, that is, proofs and comps for clients (yeah, what's the diff?) -- and I'll readily confess to accidentally sending large numbers of glossy-coated tabloid-size pages full of ASCII gibberish in full, glorious 600dpi color to the Tektronix high-res color waste paper generator -- uh, that is, Tektronix color PostScript printer in my old design shop.
It means "Paper Cassette: Load 'US letter' size (216 x 279 mm.) paper".
Which usually translates as "Some idiot has forgotten to set their default paper size to A4". Although, since every country in the whole world -- with one exception -- uses A4 (210 x 297) paper, that mistake is actually entirely forgiveable.
The malware is typically distributed in either infected email attachments or malicious scripts on often otherwise legitimate websites.
I mean, MessagelabsSymantec.Cloud catches stuff like this before the fact, right? At least they did before the Symantec acquisition.
..... They invented the laser printer.
The quality of a daisy wheel (remember them?), the versatility and speed of a dot matrix (apart from an inability to cut stencils or make Banda masters, but those hand-cranked printing presses were already on the way out), and almost silent. Not even especially expensive, at least by the second generation.
Once there was no longer a good reason not to print stuff, everybody was printing stuff.
Windows' lack of support for multiple workspaces probably didn't help a great deal, either.
windows and the complicit educational systems are largely to blame. until office workers can attach files, copy and paste, convert file types, send a freakin' email, etc. without being dependent on the program that is exporting the report to be able to transparently email via outlook you will never have your utopian dream of basic efficiency. whaaa haaa haaaa!
"The malware is programmed to generate print jobs featuring reams of garbage characters from infected PCs until connected printers run out of paper."
Hmmm, in some companies I've worked for, this behaviour would have gone unnoticed. I remember a very depressive user, suffering from the "print-emails-before-reading-them" syndrom, which, in itself, is bad enough.
She was also suffering from the more serious "if-email-doesn't-turn-out-in-10-seconds-print-again" syndrom. This one gave identical effects from this trojan, any time there was a paper jam or any crowd in the spooler.
Computer printers around the world are spewing garbage following a flare-up of a strain of malware first detected two years ago, Symantec warns.
A spike in infections by the Milicenso Trojan has hit businesses in the US, India, Europe and South America over the last two weeks or so – resulting in a massive, wasted print jobs at affected organisations...
I know this probably sounds really awful, but... why am I somehow getting a perverse kick out of this news? Yeah, I know how much damage trojans and other malware can cause, but, somehow... a trojan causing printers to spew pages of garbage characters until the paper runs out -- I'm somehow getting a huge laugh out of that.
One place that I worked for went through a painframe report cleanup exercise. We found one monthly report that was being generated that was a stack of A4 paper that stood knee-high above the floor. The recipient would just tear off the last page that contained the summary figures and send the rest of the report back to be shredded.
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