Public networked printers at a number of universities were part of the target pool of a massive print job sent out by hacker and Internet troll Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer. At least seven universities were among those that printed out flyers laden with swastikas and a white-supremacist message.

Since Auernheimer merely sent printouts to the printers and didn't actually do anything to gain access to the printers that would fall into the realm of unauthorized access, it's unlikely that he will be prosecuted in any way. Auernheimer exploited the open nature of university networks to send print jobs to the networked printers, which in some cases were deliberately left open to the Internet to allow faculty and students to print documents remotely. These printers could easily be found with a network scan of public Internet addresses.

The New York Times reports that the flyers were printed at Princeton University, University of California-Berkeley, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Brown University, Smith College, and Mount Holyoke College, as well as others. Auernheimer took credit for the printouts in an interview with the Times, saying that he had not specifically targeted the universities but had sent the flyer print job to every publicly accessible printer in North America.

The Times also reports that an apparent copycat prank printed out anti-LGBT flyers on Monday at Berkeley and Amherst. Auernheimer told the Times he was not responsible for that document.

In an e-mail to faculty and staff at Stony Brook University, the university's chief information security officer Philip Doesschate acknowledged that the flyer was output by at least one printer at Stony Brook.

"Upon being made aware of the situation," Doesschate wrote in the March 27 e-mail, Stony Brook's IT department "applied necessary filters to incoming Internet traffic in order to block these types of messages. Problems like this often arise when printers are not secured. While DoIT’s Client Support team has been working with departments over the past several months to better secure printers on our network, there is more work to be done."

Auernheimer was involved in the 2010 exposure of AT&T customer e-mail addresses by exploiting a script run by AT&T that polled customers' iPads. He was convicted in 2013, but the conviction was reversed on appeal in April 2014. He then left the US and now lives in Belgrade, Serbia.