Replace your printer! Over 700 fashions actively being attacked by hackers

Again in June, safety researchers from Rapid7 found a number of safety vulnerabilities in over 700 totally different printer fashions that pose a threat to customers. Printers from well-known manufacturers—largely Brother but additionally Fujifilm, Ricoh, Toshiba, and Konica Minolta—had been named as affected.

Now issues are getting critical as hackers are exploiting these safety vulnerabilities to hold out real-world assaults. Amongst different issues, they will discover out the default password of a printer by studying out the serial quantity and thus achieve admin entry. This makes it attainable to, for instance, combine printers into botnets, that are then exploited and used for additional assaults.

The assaults seem like each random and widespread. Any printer that’s affected by safety vulnerabilities CVE-2024-51977 and CVE-2024-51978 is an ideal goal for hackers.

Remember to replace your printers!

Because it stands proper now, it is a critical wave of assaults that’s solely going to assemble its tempo as extra printers are taken over and exploited for additional assaults. You could not even notice it’s occurring to your printer.

If you wish to defend your self, a very powerful factor you are able to do is replace your printer’s firmware to the newest model ASAP. The related producers have already supplied patches to resolve these vulnerabilities. You could find an inventory of all affected fashions right here.

You also needs to change the admin password of your printer in order that it will possibly not be deduced from its serial quantity.

Additional studying: Tricks to keep away from shopping for a printer that sucks