Man Behind Anti-Semitic Flyers Describes Exploit, Scoffs at Outcry

The man who caused thousands of printers around the world to spit out anti-Semitic flyers emblazoned with swastikas said that he did not target just colleges and universities.

"I printed to the whole world with this but only academic institutions are sobbing about it," said Andrew Aurenheimer, a well-known hacker also known as "weez," in an interview.

Aurenheimer said that "these fragile snowflakes can't handle a piece of paper. What they need are beatings and slavery, not higher education."

In Rhode Island, the flyers were printed on machines at the University of Rhode Island and Brown University, prompting school officials to condemn them and to notify their campus communities. Response to the printings at other colleges and universities were met with similar outrage. At URI, school officials said the "hate-filled, racist and anti-Semitic flyers. . .are offensive and contrary to the University's core values of community, equity and diversity that welcome everyone."

Aurenheimer said that he was able to accomplish the mass-printing with just a tiny snippet of code and an easy search for unsecured printers connected to the Internet.

The idea was hatched in an Internet Relay Chat channel inhabited by members of The Daily Stormer, a white supremacist group that has been classified as a hate group by the Anti Defamation League.

"In our chat I asked aloud a simple question: how many printers are there on the open Internet?" he explained in a Storify post describing the exploit. "I wasn't sure of the answer at the time. It turned out to be upwards of a million devices. That's a lot of things to print to. The sheer volume of paper one can generate with a single command is impressive. An average pulping tree produces 8330 sheets of paper. That is a very small fraction of the number of devices we can print to on the public internet."

Simply by sending a print command and a PostScript file containing the flyer to all those exposed printers, Aurenheimer said he was able to demonstrate how hopelessly vulnerable Internet-connected devices really are to his fellow members of the Daily Stormer chat room.

For anyone who has an Internet-connected security camera or a smart TV—and IT and network managers in offices and schools across the country—this incident serves as a warning.

Aurenheimer also said that what he did is legal.

"There's already plenty of court precedent on this," he said, citing Lamont v. Postmaster General that he said "says that you have a the right to send a political message to a party regardless of whether you know they want to receive it."

Also, he said, "the relevant statutes to alternative mediums, such as the Junk Fax Prevention act of 2005, the CAN-SPAM act of 2003 and the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 have all been limited by the judiciary to commercial speech, which my speech is not."

The flyers, addressed to "white man" ask: "are you sick and tired of the Jews destroying your country through mass immigration and degeneracy?"

Aurenheimer said he expected his message to be met with outcry because "my message is incendiary because universities are full of whining minorities that can't make it in the real world and instead have to play the victim for a living.

"A generation of special snowflakes," he said. "They need to be toughed up with a lot more than lone sheets of paper. The idea that a university needs to be protected from words and images on a paper is positively laughable. It's an inversion of everything such institutions should be."

Aurenheimer is notorious in some circles for his track record of online trolling, harassment and hacking. In 2010, he hacked AT&T and exposed e-mails belonging to 114,000 iPad owners. He served a year in jail before an appeals court overturned his conviction.