Swastika climbed from the printers

Internet troll scared university employees throughout America

On March 24, employees and students of American universities were perplexed: why leaflets with swastikas and calls to fight against the Jews for the superiority of the white race suddenly began to get out of their printers. As it turned out later, the famous Internet troll and white nationalist Andrew Orenheimer had fun. He sent his leaflet for several tens of thousands of devices to show how one person can affect many minds immediately.

On March 24, in Princeton, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Massachusetts in Amhert and other prestigious US educational institutions, the printers suddenly printed a leaflet with an appeal to fight for the superiority of the white race. The incident affected at least 20 large American universities.

About the unknown leaflets, many reports on social networks appeared; The head of the University of Massachusetts had to make an official statement: on conducting a special investigation of attacks on printers and faxes. About the incident with leaflets began to report local and national media.

As it turned out, the famous Internet troll Andrew Orenheimer arranged a mailing list. He explained that he wanted to show his supporters in the white movement, as "you can change the world with the help of just one team." According to him, in order to change the world you do not need to be the smartest, just find the way to apply the smallest amount of effort for the maximum result.

Andrew Orenhaimer said that it was easy to arrange the newsletter. First, he collected the IP addresses of devices in North America and Australia, which had a port of 9100. This is easy to do using a paid Shodan service and more difficult, but free of charge, with Masscan . To print the leaflet to print, it is enough to send a postscript file to the IP address. The Bash script for mailing took only four lines (except for a file containing a list of IP addresses).

Andrew Orenhaimer sent his leaflets to 30 thousand devices, but, according to him, not all of them were printers (and not everyone was at universities). The hacker does not know how many copies were printed in the end: he simply did not pay. According to Orenheimer, he is preparing to arrange something similar in China, Europe and Africa.

The hacker insists that his action is a political statement, and it is absolutely legal, since he used public printers. The New York Times writes that it is unclear whether it is possible to bring any accusations to Orenheimer.

On the morning of March 28, new leaflets appeared at some American universities-this time with anti-LGBT calls. The Orenheimer assured that he had nothing to do with this.

Andrew Orenhaimer is known under the nickname Weev. In 2009, he told how, with the help of a simple script, he managed to change the section from all books on Amazon about gays for pornography (Amazon denied his involvement). In 2010, Orenhaimer, together with other hackers, managed to access the e -mail of the iPad owners connected to the AT&T operator. For this, he was sentenced to three and a half years in prison, but he served only a year. After that, the court canceled the decision, since the defense managed to prove that the hackers did not have to hack anything to get information.

The hacker regretted that they talked about the vulnerability of AT&T itself. In his column for Wired, Andrew Orenheimer wrote that hackers should not tell companies about vulnerabilities, but they need to leave them a secret for those who will use holes in the “interests of social justice”.

Getting free, Andrew Orenheimer left the United States and settled in Belgrade. According to some reports , now he lives in Abkhazia.

Vladimir Tsybulsky