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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • New printers can be okay. I don’t know of any specific problems with new printers except those ones with the ink subscription services. I’m saying my printer is old because it’s from another time. The only reason you’d isolate your networked printer in 2005 would be if you didn’t want other people to access your printer. Devices in your home automatically, deliberately making themselves worse on command from a cloud service was not a thing. The biggest danger with devices this old is that they probably have unpatched security vulnerabilities exploitable by anything else that gets on your network.

    I have a VR headset from Facebook that is on its own VLAN because it defaults to randomizing its MAC address by default and this allowed it to bypass the firewall, phone home, and nonconsensually install new anti-features after being blocked because the setting got reset back to random when changing something. Recent LG TVs and other devices with worse preinstalled malware have been known to make requests to other devices on your network, but I’ve never heard of them using those other devices to get around network restrictions, at least not directly.


  • 1 is enough if the hardware manufacturer is currently trustworthy at the time you put the firewall rules in place. Brother is AFAIK trustworthy. I have a Brother printer which is on my main network with no special firewall rules, but my printer is old enough to drink. It never connected to any cloud services and could never update itself to introduce new anti-features.

    For both 2 and 3 you probably want a Raspberry Pi or other server to make the printer accessible to devices on your main network. Unless it’s a Facebook or Amazon or LG printer or something you should be fine with just 1.







  • Besides the problem of people being able to do this themselves, there’s the problem of people who develop and sell, or sometimes give away, exploits. The people scrambling to publish POCs without verifying that they’re demonstrating the right vulnerabilities are unintentionally helping out by making it difficult to find how to exploit the real vulnerabilities. Like what are you supposed to search for “php2shell exploit for real not fake?” You almost need an AI agent in a sandbox to download and run all the POCs to weed out the fake ones until one of them becomes well known.




  • Yes, and even for Debian because of ASLR, but these vulnerabilities may allow memory to be leaked and from those memory leaks an attacker can reconstruct the necessary information. That’s obviously not something just anybody could have done, but publicly available AI tools have made this level of attack complexity much more accessible. In https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CiZmq2llDg&t=629s they first find the vulnerability but their AI cheated to make it exploitable and then somebody else gives them a way to leak memory to figure out where things are in memory. I don’t think having errors enabled is actually necessary for the exploit to work, because if that was the case the PHP security announcement would have said “turn off errors” instead of “turn off your server now.”