At least 15 printers on campus were hacked on August 1 and printed racist fliers, according to UO officials. This was a part of a national racist rant, and UO wasn’t the lone victim of the hack.
The racist message was signed by “Weev,”or Andrew Auernheimer, the same hacker that created waves of controversy in March when he hacked thousand of printers on campuses across the nation.
“[Auernheimer] will find any publicly accessible printers out there – even banks and stores –wherever with printers to blast this stuff out and hope it sticks,” UO Chief Information Security Officer Will Laney said.
@rabite A friend sent me this. Did you do this? >.< pic.twitter.com/Wzt5uI144D
— Subversive (@BayAreaShitlord) August 1, 2016
Director of Strategic Engagement and Communications Kelly McIver said the affected printers were not set up with a password and were open to public access.
The message calls for “extreme violence” against people of color. It went on encouraging “the killing of children,” which it said is “completely in line with the poems that founded European morally.”
The message also praises Anders Breivik, who was convicted of mass murder of 77 people in a bomb attack and a shooting spree in Norway 2011.
“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children. We must secure this by any means necessary. Our enemies have made it clear: us or them. Let it be us. White genocide cannot continue,” one of the graphs states.
UO Outdoor Program Operation Coordinator David Villalobos, whose the printer was hacked, said he felt unsafe when he read the message on August 1.
“At first I thought it was somebody just doing research, but the more I read into it, the more absurd it got,” Villalobos said. “Being a person of color, with children and with my wife being Jewish, this is a problem.”
In March, over 100 printers were affected. Laney said since then, the university has taken proactive steps to minimize the hack.
“We did block so many printers since the last episode,” Laney said. “We’re also working with departments to locate all the printers to block them.”
University of Oregon Police Department is not looking further into the case, McIver said, as Auernheimer took the responsibility for the message the next day on Twitter.
All the things I can’t say on Twitter because they’ll ban me I just print to 50k printers and retweet when people cry about what they see.
— Andrew Auernheimer (@rabite) August 2, 2016
Laney encourages departments on campus to contact the Information Security Office to secure printers and prevent unauthorized printing.
The Junk Fax Prevention Act of 2005 prohibits the act of using “any telephone facsimile machine, computer, or other device to send, to a telephone facsimile machine, an unsolicited advertisement,” the Act reads.
