ID: IRCNE2012111684
Date: 2012-11-30
According to "cnet", owners of certain Samsung printers may find their devices a target for hackers.
Samsung printers and some Dell printers made by Samsung have a hardcoded account that someone could use to control and access information on the devices, according to US-CERT (United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team).
As described by the security team, these printers contain a hardcoded SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) string that has full read/write access and stays active even if the network protocol is disabled by the user.
"A remote, unauthenticated attacker could access an affected device with administrative privileges," US-CERT said. "Secondary impacts include: the ability to make changes to the device configuration, access to sensitive information (e.g., device and network information, credentials, and information passed to the printer), and the ability to leverage further attacks through arbitrary code execution."
Samsung is aware of the flaw and has said that printers released after October 31 of this year don't contain this weakness. The company has promised to release a patch before the end of the year to shore up the hole.
In the meantime, US-CERT advises potentially affected users to set their firewalls to allow only connections from trusted hosts and networks.
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