Hackers Spam Business Receipts With ‘Pro-Union’ And ‘Anti-Work’ Messages And Workers Are Loving It

Some people are taking the Great Resignation really seriously and are fighting for its ideas even outside of their own workplace.

Employees across the United States are finding that their store receipt printers are spamming pro-labor and pro-union messages as hackers exploit them through wireless networks.

Trying to reach those who need it the most—the underpaid, undervalued, and overworked—these messages encourage workers to discuss their wages, demand better conditions, and value their time and selves outside of their career, often directing the readers to the subreddit r/AntiWork, which has exploded in popularity in recent months.

It looks like the ideas put forth by the Great Resignation continue to spread

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As hackers exploit business printers through wireless networks to send employees antiwork manifestos

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As journalists from Motherboard have pointed out, there are countless similar posts on r/Antiwork and some Redditors have suggested that the messages are fake (i.e. produced by people who have access to a receipt printer and posted for online clout or as part of a conspiracy to make it seem like the subreddit is doing something illegal).

But Andrew Morris, the founder of GreyNoise, a cybersecurity firm that monitors the internet, told Motherboard that his firm has seen actual network traffic going to insecure receipt printers, and that it looks like someone or even multiple people are sending these printing jobs all over the internet indiscriminately, as if spraying or blasting them all over. Morris has a history of catching hackers exploiting insecure printers.

“Someone is using a similar technique as ‘mass scanning’ to massively blast raw TCP data directly to printer services across the internet,” Morris said. “Basically to every single device that has port TCP 9100 open and print a pre-written document that references r/AntiWork with some workers rights/counter capitalist messaging.”

The media has picked up on the news

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Whoever is behind this, Morris said, they’re doing it “in an intelligent way.”

“The person or people behind this are distributing the mass-print from 25 separate servers so blocking one IP isn’t enough,” he explained.

“A technical person is broadcasting print requests for a document containing workers rights messaging to all printers that are misconfigured to be exposed to the internet and we’ve confirmed that it is printing successfully in some number of places the exact number would be difficult to confirm but Shodan suggests that thousands of printers are exposed,” he said, referring to Shodan, a tool that scans the internet for insecure computers, servers, and other devices.

The history of hackers exploiting insecure printers is pretty rich. A few years ago, for example, one of them made printers spit out promotions for YouTuber PewDiePie. In 2017, another hacker made printers spread a message where they were bragging and calling themselves “the hacker god.”