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Doom on a printer

That recently happened to me. We have HP printers here and I found my printer drivers had been turned into malware that I could not delete. A format and reinstall was the only solution.

This gang uses a remote wireless device and attacks computers through their wireless printers. My wife has hers servicing an IMac and around midnight for three nights in a row it went off with lights flashing, buzzes, and flashing error messages.
Apparently their virus doesn't work on IMacs.

My printer now has the wireless turned off and is hard wired in.
 
Holy heck... well at least it does not work on the mac i guess, that's incredible yet another example of what can go wrong with all these computers being stuck into everything from fridges to toasters though i guess gee whiz.
 
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There are all kinds of "smart" devices that are set up with IP addresses that hackers are having a field day with. Those devices can be made to do whatever a hacker wants them to do, just like a computer. Those manufacturers need to take a good look at their security measures, or in most cases, the lack there of!

Although I do think it is pretty cool they got Doom running on a printer, it could easily be used to do things that are not so nice, as Hylie found out first hand. There are many devices out there that are capable of running Linux as a base operating system, whether that was originally intended by the manufacturer or not, that few people are aware of.
 
I'm still finding out about it. Win 8.1 just got corrupted again while downloading updates, and it is the printer stuff again.
 
:facepalm This time it turned out my antivirus (AVG 2015) decided a win8.1 update was a virus and "cleaned" it. :rumgone

Win8.1 sucks and I want to go back to win7. :walkplank
 
Ouch! Windows 8 is a complete disaster, it far outshines Vista as a big old steaming roadapple! Any other company would have went belly up after that big of a debacle! I refuse to give Microsoft another cent of my money, from now on, it is Linux for me. I still have my copy of Windows 7 installed for my printer, there is currently no Linux support for it because Microsoft has Dell under their draconian licensing agreement.

I highly recommend that you give Linux Mint 17 a try mate, it is really quite good! There are still a few kinks, but at least there are people working to fix them and listening to the Linux community feedback as a whole, unlike Microsoft, who is only interested in how much money they can squeeze out of their customers. With Windows 9, Microsoft will charge you a monthly fee for the privilege forcing you to use their "operating" system! :whipa
 
Maybe I will try it, but at my age my learning curve is pretty much a flat line. Anything new has to be familiar.
 
It is an all mouse environment and the control panel is very similar to Windows, the only time you will ever see a terminal screen is if you want to. It comes with almost all the software you will need pre-installed. I highly recommend the Linux Mint 17 Mate 64 distro, it is very similar to Windows.
 
AVG is the problem, not Win 8.1. My latest adventure with AVG was last week when it decided it wanted to repeatedly scan my laptops' SSD and killed it in two days (my laptop generally sits idle, but AVG kept it on and scanning until it burned up the drive). AVG has recently also been removed from all of our office machines because of similar issues where they are essentially 'ransoming' us to purchase approval from them so their heuristics don't trigger on our internal software (items written in house that talk to internal servers). They are wanting around $3k per application to add it to their 'safe' list.

For personal use, I like the latest Linux builds on my media devices (media server in the living room is on a Ubuntu with XBMC, old laptop is running Ubuntu for surfing the net). Unfortunately, in the corporate environment Linux is a loser. I have developed for Linux, Windows, and Mac with many flavors of development for each and I have never seen the disaster of (lack of) standardisation that Linux brings. Even one build change can take a completely standard, working system and make it so horribly unstable that it will leave it useless for work. Trying to keep drivers working for multiple printers is a complete nightmare. We have three certified and trained Linux guru staffers whose sole job is to keep the Linux boxes working. We have one Windows staffer (me) who keeps more than 10:1 ratio of Windows boxes running (servers and desktops). Moving to subscription based in the corporate environment is a great move. It saves us from having to buy volume packs of licenses that we will not use 25% of simply to keep a reserve in case we need more.

In the past 5 years in our company environment we have had 4 security breaches. 1 was from an infected iOS device that was connected to the network at one of our satellite offices (against policy) and the other 3 were from Linux machines that had their security broken using various means. I do enjoy getting to rub that in the Linux gurus faces when they start ragging on Windows. I personally am pretty neutral on the both Win/Lin as OS's and they both have their place, but when it comes to making my life easier I have to go with Win every single time.
 
In a corporate environment where you are managing multiple machines and user accounts, I do agree, Windows is a better solution for workstations. Monthly subscriptions also make more sense for corporate customers. For personal use though, or even small business/home office in my opinion Linux is a better solution, especially when compared to Windows 8. I also agree that each has their purpose.

Any system is hackable, given enough time and determination. Windows 7 was very good and I was impressed with the direction they took it in, but I am extremely disappointed with Windows 8. I guess I am just too old school, if I wanted a smartphone operating system, I would buy a smartphone.
 
@Thagarr one of my friends put vista and 8 on two machines side by side a few months ago and vista actually performed better it was hilarious.

AVG... BLEEPING AVG they used to be good and the version i have on my machine is set up to be good but boy howdy have they turned into a steaming pile of Electronic Arts i cant believe it , the free version now comes bundled with viruses so unless you have an old installer you cant get it (not that you want it frankly) if you update it the thing kills your damn computer and if you dont update it the thing just generally trys to harass you i had to block part of it with my firewall to stop it.

Swapping over to kasperskey soon i think.
 
Some people are nerds and some are neanderthals. After 2 wrecked dvds I give up on linux.

Did switch from AVG to BitDefender tho.
 
Man, don't give up on Linux just because you burnt a couple of coasters! What program are you using to burn the ISO's?
 
I almost always install from a bootable thumb drive. Much faster than DVD and more easily updated.
 
Oh man, that is your problem, Windows burning routines are pathetic. Give ImgBurn a try, it is one handy little program, and pretty simple to use. you can get it HERE!
 
I almost always install from a bootable thumb drive. Much faster than DVD and more easily updated.

Indeed, it is, but that can be a pain sometimes on older systems. I think Hylie is going to try it on one of his older boxes.
 
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