SNMP exploit causes printers to jam

Buggy firmware means restart needed

By John Leyden • Get more from this author

Posted in Personal, 21st February 2002 19:27 GMT

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A denial of service vulnerability has been reported in some versions of the firmware for Hewlett-Packard JetDirect printers.

According to a note on the BugTraq security mailing list, HP printers are far more susceptible to SNMP vulnerabilities than was at first believed when general problems with the protocol surfaced earlier this month.

If even a single malformed SNMP packet is received by the printer running the latest versions of HP's firmware it will crash, early tests suggest. A restart may be required in order to regain normal functionality.

HP has yet to issue a response on the issue. ®