PRET – Printer Exploitation Toolkit | Hacker News Reader

PRET – Printer Exploitation Toolkit

github.com

48 pointspabs315 comments

While playing with Shodan.io many year back I was taken back how many open printers there were on the internet. Even large office multifunction devices with the default password still enabled. Many of these where in University settings. How was this even possible ?

I could see that. My run-of-the-mill state university had such a large block of publicly addressable IP4 addresses, that every device on the network (both wired and wireless) were directly issued their own internet-facing IP address, rather dealing with internal IPs and firewalls and NAT and whatnot.

I'm sure other universities have similarly large IP4 blocks, and are similarly cavalier with assigning them.

This is what hacker giraffe used to print to 70,000 printers printing "subscribe to pewdiepie".

I literally listened to an episode of Darknet Diaries last night about this [1]. This podcast is amazingly well researched and a fascinating description of infosec case studies, often with interviews with the individuals involved. I highly recommend it!

[1] https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/31/

If only there is something like this to “fix” my printer to print black and white when cyan color is out.

A lot of printers mix other colors into black print as well to create a deeper black than black ink or toner alone would produce.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_black

OP meant to get the printer to print in black and white when there's no cyan/magenta/yellow ink. Many color inkjets have the bad habit of not allowing you to print anything if one of the cartrigdes is empty -- even if you don't need said cartridge.

I had expected that the conclusion of what I wrote would be obvious and omitted it: the printer might not be able to produce the correct shade of black without the color cartridges and therefore refuses to work if one of them is empty.

The expectation that it could work without ink or toner of a color is understandable but not necessarily correct.

Right, but in theory the black ink cartridge should be enough? I mean, we used to have B&W inkjets (I don't know if there still are just B&W ones, haven't bought a printer in over 10 years, and last one was a laser anyway).

Then disable rich black and use the regular ink?

Remember having an absolute blast in high school with this. Oh, the things we did in the computer lab!

this needs a (2017) in the title

This project hasn’t been committed to in at least 3 years, why is this getting posted today?

A lot of printers are still exploitable.

There was a post from the EFF about printers recently, it reminded me about the PRET project.

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