SecurityTube

86,800 network printers open to the whole internet - is one of them yours?

JB

Last week we wrote about programmers uploading their private keys along with their public source code.

Hot on the heels of that "epic fail" story comes another internet insecurity meme: network printers left open on the internet.

UK blogger @skattyadz, alias Adam Howard [*], did a Google search for a URL matching the pattern you might use to connect to a nearby printer on your office network.

He reports that he got back "about 86,800 results." (Geeks will notice that's very close to 86,400 - the number of seconds in a day.)

For what it's worth, Howard built up a search term specific to HP printers. If you were to repeat his experiment with other vendors' URLs in the search mix, you'd probably get hundreds of thousands more publicly-visible printers.