I'm in a bad way right now. Personal issues just about every week have made this semester the semester from Hell. Well, today was the worst, I've almost snapped from stress, depression, lots of stuff. Not meaning for this to be emo, just want to set up what goes into these posts more. Anyways I went running tonight. Car's messed up, needed to get out so I just lit out runnin. Ended up (so far, no where near done) at the school library, wanting to do some hacking. A lot of my hacking is done when I'm trying to clear my mind of larger issues, which is how I get issues so bottled up inside that I can snap. This is an problem, but tonight, I just need an escape. So I *just* hit publish on a semi-decent write up of fun I've had with printers, I want to show you some more in depth.
I'd like to start with saying I'm not doing this to be malicious... I'm just curious about these printers. Nothing I do will be aimed at hurting the printer in any way, nor the school network. I'm not doing anything here because I'm bitter or have pent up stress, I need an escape, and here's a great way to spend 30 minutes off in a wonderful world of binary choices where everything works out right. Without further ado: a look at my schools printers.
Tech specs: My school primarily uses HP printers, and specifically we have a LOT of 4350's. I really like these printers, not sure why because I don't know many printers by model number, but they're very user (read: hacker) friendly. Walked right up to one, figured out how to make it spill its guts half a minute later. They print rather fast (52 pages per minute, though PDFs take forever to spool up), and the quality's nice (1200x1200 dpi).
So what does this take? If you walk up to one of these (most modern printers you can adapt this technique to real easily) push the big green check mark button, this brings up the menu. Scroll down one, push the green button again, and you'll get "Information". The first item (if you've got my model) is "Print Menu map", go ahead and do this. In a few seconds, the printer will spit out a nice, two-sided, menu-mapping. Take this to your seat and pretend to proof-read it.
Above you see the administrative section of the printer. Here's some fun stuff including it's IP, and a wealth of other information. Note: Secure Web - Optional... bingo. The other pages have good information as well, well worth poking around.
Lets type that IP we found into our browser, and note that it looks a lot like our printouts, just a prettier display. There doesn't appear, at first glance, to be any special admin control from here (other than being able to pause/resume print jobs), but still kind of cool (check out the "Control Panel" tab... you can read what's on the LCD!).
Ok, that's just kinda cute recon, lets do some real hacking. The picture below is a handy little file tree that the printer will spit out for you. Please note, for those of you who don't know permissions, that there are 9 letters; r (read) w (write) x (execute) repeated three times. They specify the permissions for "owner group other".
Now, our goal is to gain access to this file system, and if we can get FTP, or TELNET up and running, we can look at these lovely files. I'm going to leave that for another day, as I'm getting weird looks from the center desk staff of the library, and I've been here for a bit too long. Back to my run, I hope this was informative!
