How Bugbear bugs printers
I understand that Bugbear attacks printer spooling on shared resources. I run several different HP print appliances for printing. Even though the shared device was not installed or mapped on the infected computer, all six of my hubs were hit, because all printers 100+ starting printing garbage sent by Bugbear. How was this done?


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I posed this question to my friends in the Anti-Virus Information Exchange Network (www.avien.org), as I've not had a chance to play much with this new critter yet.

The short answer is that the printers/print servers appear in the Windows Network Neighborhood. One thing rarely mentioned in virus/worm descriptions is that some worms use the Network Neighborhood as their invasion map for a corporate network. The antivirus vendors typically only mention "Mapped Drives" in their descriptions.


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This was first published in October 2002