Two Year Old Malware Infects Thousands of Office Printers
Considering a career change? You may want to see if Dunder Mifflin is hiring. A piece of malware first discovered in 2010 is making the rounds, and it's wreaking havoc on thousands of office printers, resulting in pages of "garbled printouts" and reams of wasted paper. It's a "paper saleman's dream come true," Symantec says.
Trojan.Milicenso, as the culprit is called, compromises computers via traditional means, such as through email attachments and/or visiting websites hosting malicious scripts. In the case of the latter, it usually occurs when an office worker clicks on a link in an unsolicited email, thus breaking one of the cardinal rules of common sense computing practices.
Image Source: Flickr (leokoivulehto)
Once infected, the Trojan creates a heavily encrypted DLL file that makes it difficult to detect. It then gets busy gathering data and sending it back to a remote hacker, which is the real threat here. An annoying side effect, however, is the creation of what appears to be a common printer spool file (it's actually an executable) that triggers print jobs of garbled text.
Trojan.Milicenso, as the culprit is called, compromises computers via traditional means, such as through email attachments and/or visiting websites hosting malicious scripts. In the case of the latter, it usually occurs when an office worker clicks on a link in an unsolicited email, thus breaking one of the cardinal rules of common sense computing practices.
Image Source: Flickr (leokoivulehto)
Once infected, the Trojan creates a heavily encrypted DLL file that makes it difficult to detect. It then gets busy gathering data and sending it back to a remote hacker, which is the real threat here. An annoying side effect, however, is the creation of what appears to be a common printer spool file (it's actually an executable) that triggers print jobs of garbled text.
