Be Excellent To Each Other

Twice in the last two weeks, my printer has printed by itself. This has occured at random, and I haven't been doing anything interesting or unusual at the time. It prints the following:



Which appears to be an HTTP header, although why its being sent to the printer I haven't a clue.

Some Googling gives no hint what is causing this. I've never visited the aforementioned site. Ideas?

My guess : Pod people.

Or maybe you've somehow got a printer share facing the internet, and some Chinese script kiddies are trying to do something weird to your set up?

Is there a PC turned on?

Reavers.

It's a locally-installed printer connected to my work PC, it's not on a network share. My work PC is on

Candarian Demons.

It could be your work PC doing it. Run a virus scan lately?

Often viruses will copy themselves to any network resources they can find - and they cannot always tell the difference between a printer and a computer so it could be a file that is trying to be spread.

That's what I figured.

Do you have a router that keeps a track of the sites you've visited, CG? If so, turn it on.

Yup, malware too. Nothing untoward found.

Hmmm, I do not, but everything I do at work is strictly mundane and legit, nothing interesting.

Would you be allowed to install Fiddler?
http://www.fiddler2.com/fiddler2/

It will keep track of all the http requests your PC makes, what process made the request, and when.

Stranger and stranger - more printouts awaiting me this morning. More for Sinna, but also springerlink.com, and sciencedirect.com.

It occurs to me these are sites that my colleagues may conceivably browse in the context of their work. Is it possible that my printer has been set as their proxy, or gateway, or something? So that instead of sending HTTP requests to the network NAT/Switch, it's sending it to my printer which is just printing the requests?

Plot thickens: Turns out these printouts are appearing on shared printers elsewhere in the building, ones I don't have access to or aren't installed on my PC, so I very much doubt the problem is with me.

But you said the printer was connected directly to your PC?

Actually, that was a wrong statement, and I am stupid. It *is* on the network, but only I have access to print on it.

Ah. That's quite different, yes

That sounds like the print server has some kind of weird debug tool on port 80(80) that broadcasts whatever is sent to it to all the printers. You should arrest - get the ip/ name out of the printers control panel, add it to your hosts file as goatse.cx and browse to it.

Or wait for the it spod to check its logs to find the idiot.