A student from the Univesity of Bochum in Germany have published a very interesting thesis regarding the security of network printers. His work is a survey of weaknesses in the standards and various proprietary extensions of two popular printing languages: PostScript and PJL.

Based on tests with twenty laser printer models from various vendors practical attacks were systematically performed and evaluated including denial of service, resetting the device to factory defaults, bypassing accounting systems, obtaining and manipulating print jobs, accessing the printers’ file system and memory as well as code execution.

The author has used our solution vFeed vulnerability & threat community edition database to build his vulnerability model.