HP Printers May Pose Fire Hazard, Hacker Bait

According to an article over at Ars Technica, new HP printers sold in the last little bit may pose a risk of causing fires in residences, as well as being open for hackers to pull printed items from the internet. MSN also did a pretty length story on it, comparing it to selling you a car with no keys to it. The fire hazard comes from the potential for hackers to send rapid instructions to the embedded system controlling the printer, overloading it and causing it to overheat, even to cause flames.

This could be scary since we’re quickly approaching tax season. You might want to see if your model is affected, just in case. HP printers are one of the most popular brands of printers, with almost half of the recently sold printers being attributed to HP. HP has recently had a change of CEO’s, bringing in Meg Whitman from California and eBay fame. I’m interested to see how the mighty Meg handles this problem.

 

Sources:

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/11/hp-printers-can-be-remotely-controlled-and-set-on-fire-researchers-claim.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss

http://redtape.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/11/29/9076395-exclusive-millions-of-printers-open-to-devastating-hack-attack-researchers-say