PaperCut Screws Up Again, Ships a Second Bloody Emergency Patch
Right then, here’s the latest installment of “How Many Times Can One Company Set Fire to the Printer Room?” PaperCut has shoved out a second emergency patch for its MF and NG print management software because the first round of fixes apparently wasn’t enough to stop attackers from having a bloody field day.
The juicy mess revolves around two security flaws: CVE-2023-27350, an authentication bypass bug, and CVE-2023-27351, an information disclosure flaw. In plain English: one bug lets the bad bastards stroll right past login protections, and the other helps them poke around where they absolutely shouldn’t. Combine that with internet-exposed servers and you’ve got the sort of crapstorm that keeps incident responders chain-drinking coffee at 3 a.m.
PaperCut had already released emergency fixes, but because reality is a cruel, stupid bastard, they’ve now had to issue another patch and update their guidance. The company says this new update improves protection for customers, especially those idiots—I mean unfortunate souls—running exposed servers or who hadn’t fully locked things down. If your print server is hanging out on the public internet, congratulations: you’ve basically taped a “Hack Me, You Pricks” sign to the front door.
Security researchers and incident response crews have been seeing these flaws actively exploited in the wild. That means this isn’t some theoretical academic wankery where a professor in sandals mutters about attack surfaces. Real attackers have been abusing these bugs, and compromised servers have reportedly been used to deploy malware and all the usual post-exploitation shit you’d expect once criminals get a foothold.
PaperCut is telling admins to patch immediately, review whether their servers are exposed to the internet, check logs for suspicious activity, and generally stop treating printer infrastructure like some harmless office afterthought. Because yes, even the crappy machine that jams on page three can become the entry point for a full-blown network compromise. Stunning, I know.
The fix applies to supported PaperCut MF and NG versions, and if you’re running affected builds, the message is simple: update the damn thing now. Not after lunch. Not after the change board meeting. Not when Gary from accounting is done printing his 400-page spreadsheet in landscape. Now.
The broader lesson, for the thousandth bloody time, is that internet-facing enterprise software with known exploits is basically a magnet for every malicious gobshite on the planet. If your patching process moves slower than a dead slug in winter, attackers will absolutely beat you to it and make your week far more exciting than you wanted.
Anecdote time: years ago, some smug manager told me the print server wasn’t “business critical” and could wait for maintenance next quarter. Two days later the thing got owned, users couldn’t print, payroll panicked, and suddenly the same manager was breathing down my neck asking why “IT didn’t prevent this.” Funny how a printer becomes bloody mission-critical the moment the shit hits the fan.
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