Can Multifunctional Copiers or Printers be Infected with Malware?

Multifunctional Copiers or Printers be Infected with a Malware?

My first thought was….. this is AWESOME! 

Finally all of those tree huggers than complain about the world’s most re-usable resource (paper) may be affected by this new malware infection.  My second thought was, how can I get a hold of this and get this malware to all those rotten people out there that have hung up on me, not called me back (ever), or went with a cheap price!  Can we all remember this one, “the thought of a cheap price is long forgotten after poor service”. 

This also reminds me of the early days of faxing; this is when all plain paper/thermal fax machines were using roll paper.  Guys in the office would send an endless fax to a business that either ticked them off.  The trick was to take and original document, place it in the feeder of the fax machine and then roll the original and the tape the end of the sheet of paper to the front.  The result is that you would have a rolled original document that would be an endless loop.  You would then dial the fax number, press the start key and the document would be set to endless scan.  The result on the receiving machine is that it would continue to print until the roll of paper ran out!  I can remember that some of the paper rolls lengths were 500 feet.  Can you im agine walking in the office in the AM and seeing 500 feet of fax paper all over the floor, or sitting at your desk and just seeing the fax keep printing for hours!

Luckily there was no caller ID then, and one of our guys in the office got caught because he forgot to clear out the sender TTI, this actually told the customer where the document was being transmitted from.  It was not the professional thing to do, however some customers did deserve payback!

With this current malware named Trojan.Milicenso, the infected PC will print out pages of garbled data to the connected printer.  The article I read also indicated that this virus was most prevalent in the US, Europe and India.

The garbled pages of data reminds me of when I first started with installing print drivers, seems when I installed the wrong the print driver and then selected a file to print, we would then get pages and pages of garbled data and the only way to stop it was to turn the printer or multifunctional copier off!

So, can multifunctional copiers become infected with a virus? After doing a Google search and scanning through the first ten pages I came up with nothing. I’m thinking it may have something to do with Operating Systems that multifunctional copiers use that would make them less susceptible to viruses.

If anyone has any additional information on this I’d love to hear about it.

-=Good Selling=-