Monday, June 25, 2012

There is an evil printer virus on the loose

Here’s another reason to hate your printer. Although, for the first time, it’s not any fault of its. According to Symantec, a virus called Trojan.Milicenso is on the loose and it’s making printers churn out garbage printouts. The fact that the virus actually makes the printer print stuff is nothing sort of miraculous – maybe someone should reverse engineer it. Okay fine, I will be done with the evil printer jokes.

Anyways, Symantec says that they have received multiple reports of massive print jobs being sent to print servers, printing garbage characters until the printer runs out of paper.” The virus has spread through US and India, and is now crawling parts of Europe and South America. The medium of delivery is the same: infected website or an email attachment.

The virus generates a .spl file, which while appearing to be a common printer spool file, is actually an executable file and is detected as Adware.Eorezo. Depending on the configuration, any files, including binary files, created in that folder will trigger print jobs. This explains the reports of unwanted printouts observed in some compromised environments. Based on what we have discovered so far, the garbled printouts appear to be a side effect of the infection vector rather an intentional goal of the author.”

To avoid getting infected, keep your anti-virus up-to-date and run a full scan if you find your PC behaving suspiciously. Also, if you see a webpage with tons of flashy adverts promising you money or some sort of reward, it’s probably not a good idea to click anywhere in it. I mean, come on…

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