Your printer printing garbage? It could be a virus

Is your office printer putting out a lot of garbled data? Look out: chances are, the computers in your network are infected with a Trojan.

 

Dubbed Trojan.Milicenso, the malware will automatically print out pages full of garbled data, tech site PC World quoted security vendor Symantec as saying.

 

"The Symantec researchers believe that Adware.Eorezo, which redirects users to French-language website, is being used by Trojan.Milicenso as a decoy to distract attention from itself," PC World quoted Symantec as saying.

 

"Based on what we have discovered so far, the garbled printouts appear to be a side effect of the infection vector rather an intentional goal of the author," it quoted the Symantec researchers as saying.

 

PC World said Symantec's security researchers found the Adware.Eorezo file was being dropped on affected computers by new variants of Trojan.Milicenso.

 

While Trojan.Milicenso first appeared in 2010, a new outbreak has been recorded during the past two weeks, Symantec's security response team said.

 

Symantec also said its findings showed the worst hit regions were the US and India followed by regions in Europe and South America.

 

PC World said Trojan.Milicenso can be distributed as a malicious e-mail attachment, as a drive-by download launched from compromised websites or as a fake codec advertised by social engineering scams.

 

Once the malware infects a PC, it drops a copy of Aware.Eorezo as a randomly named .spl file (Windows Printer Spool File).

 

The spool directory temporarily holds copies of files that printers are scheduled to print.

 

"This causes printers attached to computers infected with new Trojan.Milicenso variants to automatically print the contents of the rogue .spl file, sometimes until their paper runs out," PC World said. — TJD, GMA News