By hacking into the bill printers of businesses around the world, someone is making an "anti-work" manifesto. There are dozens of posts in the Reddit community claiming to have seen the manifesto, and a cybersecurity company is analyzing network traffic to insecure printers.
According to several screenshots posted on Reddit and Twitter, one of the manifestos read: "Are you paying more than your paycheck?" You have a protected legal right to discuss your compensation with your colleagues. [Low wages exist because people are 'willing' to work for them]".
On Tuesday, a Reddit user wrote in a post that the manifesto was printed haphazardly in his work. The post read: "Who among you is doing this because it's hilarious. My colleagues and I need answers."
There are countless similar posts on r/Antiwork subreddit, some of which have this same manifesto. Others have different messages, but all have the same sentiment of worker empowerment. All of these posts are recommended for readers of information to check out.
One Reddit post read: "Stop using my ticket printer, guys. It's hilarious, but I wish it had stopped." Another post read: "I like r/antiwork, but please stop spamming my ticket printer".
Another post read: "In the past week, I have randomly received about 4 different messages at work. It was inspiring, encouraging, and it was interesting to see his expression when my boss had to tear them off the printer".
Some on Reddit believe that the information is fake (i.e., printed out by people who have access to a ticket printer and released for Reddit's influence) or is part of a conspiracy to feel that the r/antiwork subsection is doing something illegal.
But Andrew Morris, founder of GreyNoise, a cybersecurity firm that monitors the internet, told Motherboard that his company has seen actual network traffic go into unsecured ticket printers, and it appears that someone or more people are indiscriminately sending these print jobs on the internet, like spraying or blasting everywhere. Morris has some experience in catching hackers who exploit unsafe printers.
Morris told Motherboard in an online chat: "Someone is using a technology similar to 'mass scanning' to spray raw TCP data directly onto the internet to printer services on a massive scale. Basically, for every device that opens tcp 9100 ports, print a pre-written document that references some workers' rights/anti-capitalist information from /r/antiwork."