Hardcoded Administrator Account Opens Backdoor Access To Samsung Printers 103
hypnosec writes "A new flaw has been discovered in printers manufactured by Samsung whereby a backdoor in the form of an administrator account would enable attackers to not only take control of the flawed device, but will also allow them to attack other systems in the network. According to a warning on US-CERT the administrator account is hard-coded in the device in the form of an SNMP community string with full read-write access. The backdoor is not only present in Samsung printers but also in Dell printers that have been manufactured by Samsung. The administrator account remains active even if SNMP is disabled from the printer's administration interface."
Re:Bloated Hardware (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. Because we don't want any way to prevent student A from cancelling student B's jobs. Or any way for a trusted user, such as the sysadmin, from cancelling all jobs.
And we definitely want all nimwits on the network to have complete and arbitrary control over how many pages they can use, or how much ink. Maximum quality print jobs in a comp sci department printer? No problem! (I remember watching a dot-matrix printer spit out a core file, that was entertaining.)
Definitely, no good whatsoever could come from a printer with any authentication control.
Obviously, Samsung agrees, because all their printers apparently have the same unchangeable admin account and password.
Re:This isn't the first time I have heard of this (Score:4, Insightful)
Someone needs to invent a fairly simple device. It would have two Ethernet ports and a USB port. The USB port is used for programming it, perhaps then used for power. The Ethernet ports would be used for bridging/routing.
You put the device between whatever device and the rest of the network, select what purpose the device does, (or manually specify ports), and call it done, with the thing automatically proxying/masquerading. Print job hits port 515 on the device, the device sends the packets to the printer.
This way, even if there is some unknown port, it gets shut off.
Of course, the next step for backdoors would be backdoors in protocols (such as unique packets that normally would get ignored), but that can be found by DPI.
Re:Forget about the printers... (Score:2, Insightful)
What about the Samsung backdoor into your phones?
That's the first thing I thought too, that if we just discovered this in Samsung printers is there a hardcoded backdoor in Samsung galaxy s3 phones too?
Re:Bloated Hardware (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh good, because we wouldn't want to have any assurances that our 100MB print jobs were transferred to the printer successfully... Or know when they're running low on toner... or that there's a paper jam and the printer has caught fire... or be able to tell it to use the media in tray number 5... or be able to connect a printer to your WiFi network.