Imgur A well-known hacker who goes by "weev" says he was the man behind fliers featuring swastikas and calls to join the "struggle for global white supremacy" that came out of printers around the US earlier this week.

In what he called a "brief experiment," weev (real name: Andrew Auernheimer) scanned the internet for printers that allowed for printing from anywhere, then used five lines of code to have them print out the fliers, which also directed people to go to the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website.

"I wasn't even convinced this was working at all until the tweets started coming in," he wrote in a blog post at Storify.

The messages appeared everywhere from the University of California to Princeton, and even in some workplaces. Auernheimer told The New York Times that what he did was about free speech.

While many believed their printers were being "hacked," that wasn't really the case since the devices were open to anyone to connect and print to them.

As the Times notes, it's not really clear any laws were violated. If anything, this incident highlights the security issues that arise when devices are connected directly to the internet without passwords.

Plenty of information technology departments quickly learned this and were working on a fix.

"To help prevent networked printers from outside exploitation and misuse, [Information Technology Services] has since blocked external print communications to the Smith campus network," a spokesman for Smith College told MassLive.

"Berkeley wants to be #1 in many areas, but being #1 in printers listed as listening on the public internet as reported by shodan shouldn't be one of those areas," University of California-Berkeley CISO Paul Rivers told employees on the university mailing list. He mentioned shodan, a search engine that can find all kinds of devices connected to the internet.

Auernheimer was convicted in 2010 of hacking-related charges after he and a group of hackers found a way into AT&T's servers and accessed data on hundreds of thousands of customers. Much like this printer incident, it was found that the AT&T server had no password protection, and Auernheimer's conviction was overturned on appeal.