Security News > 2021 > June > Lexmark Printers Open to Arbitrary Code-Execution Zero-Day

Lexmark printers - those ubiquitous, inky office workhorses that fill homes and offices, and are found all the way on up to the federal government - have an unpatched vulnerability that could lead to serious, easy-to-execute attacks that require neither privileges nor user interaction and which can lead to arbitrary code execution.

Beyond known security vulnerabilities, Lexmark printers have in the past been prone to a trivial hack thanks to what researchers have called "Gross negligence" on the part of users.

In 2017, researchers at NewSky Security warned that they had found hundreds of Lexmark printers misconfigured, open to the public internet and easily accessible to anyone interested in taking control of targeted devices.

Adversaries with access to those printers could perform a number of malicious actions: The fact that they were open to the internet enabled attackers to add a backdoor, to capture print jobs, to knock a printer offline, to print junk content or to physically disrupt a printer's operation.

Besides Lexmark users' negligence, U.S. government use of Lexmark printers pockmarked with security vulnerabilities has been rife.

At the time, according to the audit, the National Vulnerabilities Database listed 20 cybersecurity vulnerabilities in Lexmark printers, including storing and transmitting sensitive network access credentials in plain text and allowing the execution of malicious code on the printer.

News URL

https://threatpost.com/lexmark-printers-code-execution-zero-day/167111/