Aaron Weaver has taken the concept of Inter protocol XSS hacking to the next annoying level. That’s right folks, he has figured out that you can do cross site printing. That is, when you visit a malicious website, it can attempt to connect to and send data to your printer on your local network. The obvious use? You got it, spam!

So now, when you visit sites, there is a potential for them to spam you, similar to the way some people receive FAX spam. While he has only gone so far as to show how you can send ASCII art, it would be interesting to see if a PostScript formatted file could be sent in a way that the printer would understand and print. For the time being, however, we are limited to low def ASCII art spam.

However, there are some fairly complicated programs that do analysis on and generate ASCII art from photos. What will be more nasty is once this turns into actual exploits against the printers themselves - as many printers contain copies of printed materials for weeks or years afterwards. Also, depending on what the spammers put on your printer, it’s possible this could get people fired, depending on the content of the print job (no pun intended). Very interesting research by Aaron Weaver!