Hate flyers appear on UW campus printers

UW-Madison cybersecurity staff are responding to a harassment campaign targeting Internet-accessible printers on campus.

Last week, attackers located printers that were open to receive print jobs from the Internet and remotely printed a number of racist, anti-Semitic and anti-gay flyers.

Since that initial notice, the university has learned that the same flyer has appeared on a number of other printers throughout the UW–Madison campus and on printers at other universities across the U.S.

The flyers began appearing Thursday at schools including the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Princeton University, Brown University and the University of Southern California, among others.

“At Wisconsin, we value our diversity, in all of its forms, and are trying to create a safe and inclusive community for everyone,” says Dean of Students and Vice Provost for Student Life Lori Berquam. “Although these flyers are apparently from outside our community, we are very glad they were reported.”

Cybersecurity has determined that the messages are coming from an external source and has been working with campus IT administrators to reconfigure printers and related equipment in order to rectify the situation as quickly as possible.

Cybersecurity has identified an IP address involved in sending the flyers to campus printers and blocked it. It has also determined those UW printers that are open to the Internet, and has contacted appropriate IT staff to secure network access for them.

Technical information for IT staff on how to respond to the hack

Contact the Office of Cybersecurity with any campus report of IT incidents at abuse@wisc.edu.

To report incidents of hate and bias and to learn more about the hate and bias incident process, visit go.wisc.edu/reporthateandbias.