This article talks about research from Columbia University that reveals security hole presented by network printers.
While before these were rare machines used solely in enterprise, they are more and more becoming a common installation in every home, office and public institution.
Through the use of firmware updates, attackers can install and do arbitrary code execution via security holes in network printers.
While most people regard printers as dumb devices, an more accurate description would be a server on the local network.
This article goes to show that anything that is connected to the internet and has access to some sort of privileged information or permission can and should be considered a security thread.
Although this problem was prevalent last year I read an article in “United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team” US-CERT that pointed to a security hole in Samsung/Dell printers. In fact, these companies hardcoded SNMP full read-write community string (remains active even when SNMP is disabled in the printer management utility) in their devices.
SNMP community string is a text string that acts as a password. It is used to authenticate messages that are sent between the management station and the device (the SNMP agent). The community string is included in every packet that is transmitted between the SNMP manager and the SNMP agent.
And like you they way you mentioned a remote, unauthenticated attacker could access an affected device with administrative privileges and make changes to the device configuration, collect data about devices connected to the network and all information sent to the printer, and remotely execute code on the printer
I searched and found the code here: http://l8security.com/post/36715280176/vu-281284-samsung-printer-snmp-backdoor
Its fascinating how dummy they are, isnt it? 🙂