This Teen Hacked 150,000 Printers to Show How the Internet of Things Is Broken
originally posted on motherboardvice.com
On Saturday, February 4, 2017, a self-described "pissed off high school student" in the United Kingdom sat in front of his computer, listening to Bones and Yung Lean, coding a rootkit, a set of software tools that allows an unauthorized user to control a computer system. He got to thinking about recent news reports about printer hacking and shifted gears, instead building a short program in C. Within hours, roughly 150,000 internet-connected printers across the world began spitting out ASCII art and messages informing their owners that their machines were "part of a flaming botnet." The hacker signed his work as "Stackoverflowin."
