We purchased a machine from China and it came with malware preinstalled

Re:We purchased a machine from China and it came with malwar... by tablespoon on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @11:29AM (#30073793)

>> 20 years ago, china hide 2nd network card that was in listener mode, transmitting documents at random times, mostly peek. This was at a research company.

> Why was the printer connected to the public internet? A DMZ subnet would have prevented this vector of attack.

Aren't most network printers connected to office networks with public internet access? I sounds like this printer was making outgoing connections, and I doubt many people/companies go through the trouble of specially blocking those from printers.

You'd have to be especially security conscious and paranoid (especially 20 years ago!), to be operating under the assumption that your own equipment is working against you.

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Re:We purchased a machine from China and it came with malwar... by lostlogin on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @12:27PM (#30074731)

It doesn’t take long as a system administrator to become certain that printers are working against you. By and large they have user hostile hardware and software.

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Re:We purchased a machine from China and it came with malwar... by tablespoon on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @12:30PM (#30074805)

> By and large they have user hostile hardware and software.

Eh, typical "user hostile hardware and software" is not even in the same league as exfiltrating your data to an adversary.

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Re:We purchased a machine from China and it came with malwar... by christkv on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @12:42PM (#30075006)

I’ve found this is true for everything but brother printers. I’ll never buy another brand again.

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Re:We purchased a machine from China and it came with malwar... by jaywalk on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @12:57PM (#30075288)

The Brother color laser printer I purchased 7-8 years ago was the best printer purchase I ever made. I barely print, and the toner doesn't dry up the way inkjet ink does. It just sits there, ready for the occasional print job. No BS software required.

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Re:We purchased a machine from China and it came with malwar... by lostlogin on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @01:32PM (#30075900)

Thank you and the parent. I’ll try this path in the future.

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Re:We purchased a machine from China and it came with malwar... by throwawayboise on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @12:33PM (#30074860)

20 years ago I would have expected that most printers were connected to a parallel or serial port on a PC and any network printing functions would be handled by the PC. But then I think, wait, that was the year 2002 (which seems like yesterday when I say it) so maybe printers with direct network connections were pretty common then. My sense of the passage of time has really gotten compressed as I get older.

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