It seems that printer spam is a thing now. Employees at companies all over the world are apparently getting their printer spammed with anti-work manifestos and people telling them to quit their jobs.

Anti-work propaganda now arises

“ARE YOU BEING UNDERPAID? Begin ORGANIZING A UNION,” this is just one of the sample manifestos that have been circulating on companies recently. According to a new study published by Motherboard, “dozens” of company receipt printers are being targeted with “anti-work” diatribes, including ones that urge employees to quit their jobs.

A slew of photographs have appeared on Reddit in recent days, showing lengthy receipts inscribed with the same pro-labor, anti-capitalist rhetoric. Many of them reference r/antiwork, the increasingly popular “anti-work” subreddit, and ask employees to fight for higher pay and benefits.

In addition, receipts appear to reference a “25 or walk” movement—apparently an activist group focused on raising fast food employees’ minimum wage. The movement and its objective of elevating workers’ standard of living are mentioned in several r/antiwork postings.

Are these real?

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai of Motherboard confirmed the legitimacy of such receipts.

“Someone is using a similar technique as ‘mass scanning’ to massively blast raw TCP data directly to printer services across the internet,” said Andrew Morris, the founder of cybersecurity firm GreyNoise. Morris added that someone could be “broadcasting print requests for a document containing workers rights messaging to all printers that are misconfigured to be exposed to the internet and we’ve confirmed that it is printing successfully in some number of places.”

In layman’s terms, someone is targeting printers that are exposed to the internet with these print requests.

He stated that the number of printed receipts will be difficult to confirm but he had seen evidence that thousands of printers are exposed in a way that made them susceptible to the requests.

Great Resignation

As printer spam becomes a real issue, it looks like employees will need to start thinking about purchasing printers with security features in the future.

Also, considering this is another cybersecurity attack that can happen at workplaces across the world and all companies could be affected by printer spams, perhaps more stringent internet security measures should be taken here as printer spams can directly affect companies’ printer services.

However, the most important thing that employers should be more concerned with is the ‘Great Resignation.’

The Great Resignation is a mass movement of people resigning from the workforce en masse in 2021 due to dissatisfaction with companies, espeically with how they were treated amid the pandemic.

There are many reasons why this will happen, including because companies are increasingly taking advantage of their employees and not paying them what they deserve. Furthermore, it’s becoming more difficult for workers to advance within their companies, and many feel that they have no voice or power to make changes.

As a result of all of these factors, the Great Resignation is expected to sweep across the globe in 2021 as people leave their jobs in droves. This will create a massive shift in the workforce and could potentially lead to better working conditions for employees.