Latest Windows bug could let hackers hijack your printer, and there’s no fix for now

Your connected printer is at risk, you don’t know it and there’s no fix for it. All these have been confirmed in a report by the Bleeping Computer website. The report, citing researchers, states that there is a security flaw in Windows that can let hackers take control of a private network and hijack connected printer devices. The bug is said to be in regards with Windows Print Spooler. The service basically manages the printing process.

The bug is called as CVE-2020-1048 and was unearthed by researchers Peleg Hadar and Tomer Bar of SafeBreach Labs. They say that although Microsoft rolled out a patch for this flaw back in May, it still left a small loophole. The researchers added that anyone can craft malicious SHD or ‘Shadow files’ files and pass it through the Windows Print Spooler to affect it.

Also read: Intel hacked, 20GB of confidential, intellectual data leaked by anonymous hacker

Microsoft has however, said that there is a fix coming. But that fix will arrive by August 11, which gives hackers enough time to exploit the vulnerability.

While this might be annoying for some Windows users, what may add to it is the fact that going forward they won’t be able to uninstall the Edge Browser from their systems. That’s because the browser will be a part of the system updates. “The new version of Microsoft Edge is included in a Windows system update, so the option to uninstall it or use the legacy version of Microsoft Edge will no longer be available,” said the blog post.

For what’s worth, the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge was launched in January this year and replaced the older outdated HTML-version (Edge Legacy).