kieranmjones

Well yes, he did break the law of course there is no denying that. But in the spirit of what he did he wasn't malicious in that he kicked off a DDoS with these printers or anything more than that, it was of course illegal but at least those people now know. One of the few internet connected devices that is actually capable of giving some output to inform the owner that something is wrong!

Well I did not know that, presumably that doesn't need port forwarding and is the printer communicating out rather than open ports onto the web?

Reading the article I found myself dwelling on the quote,

"People need to take their printer out of the public internet unless it's needed..."

I'm trying to think of a single reason that a printer would need to be exposed to the public internet in any way at all. Even a corporation sharing printers between offices surely would rely on inter-site VPNs rather than just opening ports and exposing the printer to the world?

If anyone can think of a good reason to put a printer on the internet I'm all ears because I'm struggling to think of a good reason.

Credit to the teenager for not doing something malicious and in fact just being a little playful with it and educating the owners with a cheeky print out. Good work, I hope he can do well going forward and get a career from his skills despite his worries about grades etc.

It is sad for sure, he is clearly very skilled but because it doesn't fit into the framework of the national curriculum for computer science or IT he is getting bad grades. It just goes to show that grades aren't everything, I just hope he can apply those skills and make it in the industry doing legitimate work not malicious work. Some employers are quite good at seeing past grades so fingers crossed for him!

Even if they start asking for passwords, you can almost certainly rely on them not considering the impact of 2-factor. You could give them the password knowing full well that without confiscating your phone for the duration of the trip they can't get into the account. Plus what is to stop you changing the password once you get through border control, or just denying you even have a social media account, suspend it temporarily before travelling.

This seems to me just another excuse under the guise of anti-terrorism to pry into people's private lives.