Hacker manages to play Doom on a printer

Doom code has been used for many purposes over the years (most recent example is Donkey Kong Country made with Doom), but security researcher Michael Jordon, who's not a basketball legend, used it in the most unique way so far: to expose security holes in a printer.

According to a report on the BBC, who have a couple of screenshots of the game in action, the Canon Pixma, a popular wireless printer, can be accessed from the net after skipping some poor security measures.

"A check via the Shodan search engine suggests there are thousands of potentially vulnerable Pixma printers already discoverable online. There is no evidence that anyone is attacking printers via the route Mr Jordon found," writes the Beeb.

After accessing the system, Jordon decided to overwrite the device's firmware and try to run an adapted code of the classic FPS, because "running Doom is the real proof you control the thing".

Lack of proper operating system support services was the most difficult part, and "the colour palette is still not quite right", but the game is functional and the achievement is both revealing (Canon is already working on a fix) and fun.

However, the process was so troublesome that this researcher won't optimise the game further, so don't hold your breath if you have that printer at the office and you fancy fragging some demons for old time's sake.