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Printer HP Security

HP Will Give You $10,000 To Hack Your Printer (zdnet.com) 75

hyperclocker shares a report: HP hopes to entice researchers with a $10,000 reward for finding vulnerabilities in printers. The tech giant revealed the new bug bounty program on Tuesday. The scheme, which is launching as a private bug bounty, is tailored specifically for HP printer hardware. While many of us use home printers simply for printing the occasional document or photo, in the enterprise, these devices are often found in a network. If there is a weak link in business networks, a single device -- whether it be a printer or smart air conditioning system -- can be exploited to compromise a wider network system.

Printers, especially if they are overlooked when it comes to firmware updates or upgrades, can become such avenues to exploit. According to research undertaken by Bugcrowd, "2018 State of Bug Bounty Report," endpoint devices are becoming a tantalizing target for threat actors, with a 21 percent increase in total endpoint bugs reported over the past 12 months. In partnership with bug bounty platform Bugcrowd, HP says it is the "only vendor" to launch a printer-only vulnerability disclosure scheme. Under the terms of the program, researchers can earn between $500 and $10,000 per legitimate find.

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HP Will Give You $10,000 To Hack Your Printer

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  • by DarkRookie ( 5030953 ) on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @04:47PM (#57044334)
    With a hammer.
    I think it was a HP one too.
  • $10K to cut off 3rd party ink hacks is good spending.

    • I don't think this is the case. It is more like $10K to show how woefully inadequate printer security is, so you have to buy a whole new printer that is up to last years standards, that are already obsolete.

      • Interestingly the last HP advert I saw about printers directly talked about security risks that are network attached printers. It seems HP may be the only company that is at least giving this space some thought.

        Not that I think they have coders capable of making secure printers, but they are giving it some thought.

    • $10K to cut off 3rd party ink hacks is good spending.

      I picked up an HP office jet 476dx and I bought 3rd party inks.... and the printer gave some generic error and refused to use the cartridges.
      Then I updated the firmware to HP's latest, and I could use the inks.
      The point is that they shipped a printer that couldn't use third party inks, and then were guilted or otherwise moved to update the firmware to allow them. The printer now works fine with 3rd party inks that cost 1/4 what HP charges, and I only have to tolerate the printer bitching a bit when I replac

  • HP Instant Ink (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @04:55PM (#57044378)

    This is probably to "secure" HP Instant Ink, which monitors your printer so you can give an unlimited amount of money to HP, for ink refills.

    It's basically the renting models for printers, except you pay for the printer, pay for the ink, pay to be monitored, and pay either per page , or per month.

    The best part is, when the printer dies, you also get to pay for the recycling!

    HP can also help you, by automatically sending you relevant ads, on the printer you paid for, with the paper you paid for, with the ink you pay for, with the electricity you pay for, and you compensate HP for this by letting them have access to your printing data and network!

    • by Anonymous Coward

      HP can also help you, by automatically sending you relevant ads, on the printer you paid for, with the paper you paid for, with the ink you pay for, with the electricity you pay for, and you compensate HP for this by letting them have access to your printing data and network!

      A friend has one of those HP ink jet scanner combos. It has a smartphone like touch screen display with ads all over it. Unbelievable.

  • Wow this is a lot.
  • Does removing the yellow dots that identify which printer a document came out of count?

    • Does removing the yellow dots that identify which printer a document came out of count?

      My first thought. This can be used to identify a person of a company to exploit.

  • So my computer or iphone can find it. My HP printer is a shit printer.

  • I miss my old LaserJets. They were like an ox: slow, hot, and reliable over long distances.
  • Ecotank.

  • Easy (Score:4, Funny)

    by FFOMelchior ( 979131 ) on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @05:18PM (#57044610)
    Hacked mine to say my name. Please send my 10k.

    Sincerely,
    -Paul Christopher Loadletter
  • by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @05:35PM (#57044728)

    I remember fondly a long time ago, when one employee brought his private first HP color printer to his office and installed it on his machine.

    The install process replaced the print queue and it began immediately checking the company network for all printers that might be out of paper or ink, all over the world, from the US, to Europe, India and Japan.
    After an hour it had consumed all the bandwidth available polling 10-15000 printers and the network broke down.

    It was fun working IT those days.

  • My printer is a lj2300 with a jetdirect card which has well-known vulnerabilities which hp has decided not to fix. This is just pretense at caring about security, they don't actually give one shit.

  • How can you even tell if your printer has been hacked or whether it's just HP's amazingly crappy drivers, software, and firmware?

    We've got two at work that are constantly breaking on their own. They'll mysteriously go to sleep and never wake up (yes, we disabled going to sleep). They'll stop responding and need to be hard power cycled by yanking the cord. The software is an astoundingly giant pile of crap (about a gig worth) that doesn't seem to do anything useful except burn 20% cpu. I know how to drop

  • I stopped buying HP printers when they stopped supporting Linux properly. I stopped recommending them when the introduced region locked protection on consumables. Given their anti-user policies does anyone still use them as the benchmark for a good printer like they used to be a decade ago? For me HP printers are just a sad footnote in history of a company who once understood their customers, then lost the plot just to keep bean counters happy.
    • On Fedora, I have been using HP All-in-One printer/fax/copier/scanners that cost less than $100. They tend to last for a few/several years. I don't do wireless; it is plugged into a USB port.

      I just have to ensure I include the required packages and it just works...

      hplip hplip-common hplip-libs libsane-hpaio sane-backends-drivers-scanners xsane

  • or maybe just play with the IIS a little on HP's shitty web server.
  • "Sheeet, ain't much point in hacking your printer unless it lets you print out your own ten grand."

    -above-average intelligence Texan/genius-level Okie

  • Print cartridges (remanufactured) and photo paper for your printer. Enough for 500 pages.

  • The average HP printer goes dead after no longer than a year anyway. It's futile task to try to hack them, by the time you're done, it probably croaks anyway.

  • This is in regards to their Multifunction Enterprise copiers (Futuresmart 4). They run embedded linux, export a SOAP sdk for remote coding, embedded applications and authentication.

  • Don't waste time and money with HP. Get an Epson EcoTank [epson.co.uk] instead and, if you're planning to use it for a very long time, invest in a waste pad replacement [octoink.co.uk] or a bladder [octoink.co.uk].
  • Nice - offers $10K reward, then probably only pays $500 when a serious vulnerability is found.

    This is somewhat similar to the "please fill out this 10-page survey, and you have the chance to win $20K!", except that no one ever wins anything.
  • I have a HP Officejet Pro 7612. I have little experience in hacking (I have almost finished stripe CTF 2), but I have not found much documentation abour my printer. I am interested in trying to hack my printer, at least to know better all it can do. Do you have links to doc or code?
  • when the hardware is garbage?
  • Wow, I could almost afford to do a full first-party ink cartridge replacement with that kind of money! What a fucking scumbag company... the printer market needs to shoot itself in the foot already.
  • Back in the day, there was no printer security to speak of, and we had HP printers available all over the WAN. I got bored one day so I set their default messages to perplexing things such as "INSERT COIN", or "OUT OF CHOCOLATE". This was when most people were still afraid of the arrival of computers in the workplace - credulous, nearly to a man - so the effect was very satisfying.

    And I also wrote a program to simulate a dirty mouse (back when they had balls). Gave it to one of the IT guys and we heard th

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