OT: A Little Tip for Canon Printers

[Andrew Harris]

Hi,

For the past few days, my family has been suffering intolerable  
slowness on our wireless network. It was only on wifi; all the wired  
computers seemed fine. I ran virus scans on the Windows boxen, tried a  
few options on the router (a WRT54GL), and *almost* googled for "slow  
Linksys router". But then I opened up Wireshark (yes, I know, that  
should have been my *first* thought).

The first thing I noticed were shitloads of MDNS packets flying by,  
and the router trying to keep up with it all. A scrolling wall of  
crimson with occasional interruptions in Cisco-white. I clicked on one  
of the MDNS packets and saw that it was actually my printer. I yanked  
the powercord from the printer and it all stopped immediately. Our  
printer was attempting to DoS us! Our very own printer! How rude.

I plugged the printer back in and immediately went into the admin  
panel (served on port 80 at the printer's IP address) and disabled  
Bonjour and LPR service notification. I suggest you do the same should  
you purchase a Canon printer with builtin wifi.

Just remember, in the robot uprising, DoS attacks come first. Disable  
Bonjour on your devices before it comes to skeletal robots with  
miniguns mounted on either shoulder.

-ah