Black-hat ‘Weev’ Acknowledges He Hacked Printers and made them Print Racist Messages
Andrew Auernheimer the notorious Internet troll and black-hat hacker has once again embarked on his usual ploy, currently abusing several thousand unprotected printers connected online to make them print huge numbers of flyers propagating racism. Auernheimer finds exposure of printers having port 9100 could make the devices print anything one wished just via incorporating one tiny postscript file inside it.
Thirty-year-old Auernheimer, popularly recognized with the name "Weev," asserts he employed an ordinary tool for searching throughout the Internet to find flawed Web-connected machines which he could access from a distance. So he found printers in USA that he attacked. In addition there were instances in Australia too. Although a number of organizations reported about the attack, things actually heightened in universities so that a few contacted the police as well as called FBI too.
Among the many universities targeted for infiltrating their printers, some are UC Berkeley, USG, Princeton, UMass, Northwestern, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Brown University, Clark University in Worcester, and DePaul University in Chicago.
The hackers, claiming their name as Goatse Security then posted a statement that they collected the entire data from certain password-free web-server that anybody could access over the Net. However, court prosecutors described the attack even badly saying brute force had been used in the hack. According to Weev's quotes from court documents, he acknowledged participating in the assault. Masslive.com posted this, March 28, 2016.
There's a story behind Auernheimer's intention to wage the attack. During 2010, when he belonged to Goatse Security, he revealed vulnerability within one publicly-usable AT&T server as news for Gawker Media prior to informing AT&T of it. Consequently, another incident occurred that of the revelation about 114,000 iPad owners' details.
The FBI charged Auernheimer, with the latter subsequently sentenced to prison for a 41-month period. At that time, he participated in certain "white nationalist" lobby group.
Describing his actions to be some experiment, Auernheimer blogged that every printer contained exposed connections, a defense he utilized while facing his AT&T prosecution, stating anybody could use the openly-accessible server. Auernheimer's explanation failed to convince anyone back then, while it's doubtful whether it'll work this time too.
» SPAMfighter News - 4/1/2016
