Certain Samsung printers and other made by Samsung and sold under the Dell brand may be targetted by hackers, United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) reports.
Samsung printers as well as some Dell printers manufactured by Samsung contain a hardcoded account that could allow a remote attacker to take control of an affected device, US-CERT said. The hardcoded Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) full read-write community string remains active even when SNMP is disabled in the printer management utility, the organization added. This means that
a remote, unauthenticated attacker could access an affected device with administrative privileges and be free to make changes to the device configuration, access to sensitive information or leverage further attacks through arbitrary code execution.
Samsung has stated that models released after October 31, 2012 are not affected by this vulnerability.
Samsung also said that they will be releasing a patch tool later this year to address vulnerable devices.
As a general good security practice for system admins is to only allow connections from trusted hosts and networks. Restricting access would prevent an attacker from accessing an SNMP interface using the affected credentials from a blocked network location.