What are Spooling Attacks, and How to Keep Yourself Safe From Them?

When talking about cybersecurity attacks, common cyber threats, like viruses, malware, phishing, ransomware, and other social engineering attacks, come into our minds. However, with evolving cybersecurity threats, hackers are developing advanced cybercriminal activities to breach data and compromise sensitive business information. 

One such attack is the Spooling attack, which involves storing or saving data temporarily, so it can be processed later. 

Spooling, for the uninitiated, is an acronym for Simultaneous Peripheral Operation On-Line, is a multi-programming cyberattack that includes copying and transferring data to other devices. 

What are these devices? What exactly is the purpose of spooling, and how exactly does it work?🤔 In this article, we’ll answer all these questions and more so you get a clear picture of spooling and what it means. 

What is Spooling? 

Spooling, commonly used in computer and networking systems, refers to temporarily saving data in physical or volatile memory, so it can be efficiently and easily processed later. 

This process of temporarily saving data allows the CPU to remain in an execution mode for a longer period until it can execute the instructions transmitted to the network and the data is transferred to other devices. 

This process typically involves implementation on input/output devices, like printers, keyboards, and mice. 

This buffering mechanism of storing data to be executed later makes it easier for multiple operations to be performed at a single time—improving the system’s performance. Simply put, the stored data stays in line for execution until it’s time to run. 

The most common and real-life example of spooling is a printer🖨️. When you send multiple files or documents for print, the printer spooler spools the document, printing each document one by one in the correct order. 

This spooling mechanism is used for multiple purposes, including keeping track of tasks in the queue that need to be completed, storing data to transmit it over the network, or improving the performance of the systems, allowing a slow device like a printer to catch up to a much faster device. 

Unfortunately, the cybercrimes businesses should be aware of list is ever expanding as hackers find newer ways to breach security, and one of them is spooling.

Spooling as a Cybersecurity Threat 

Cybercriminals exploit⚠️the buffering nature of spooling and its ability to improve the system’s performance. 

In a spooling attack, cybercriminals overload the system by sending it with too much malicious data, especially to vulnerable devices. Thus, it acts as a Denial of Service (DoS) attack, flooding the system with a lot of malicious data, which can be difficult to detect due to it appearing as a legitimate traffic flow. 

Once cybercriminals access the network or the system data through spooling, they can modify it, make changes, or even inject malicious codes to gain remote access to the system or device control. This control allows cybercriminals to conduct cybercriminal activities, like data breaches and sabotage or theft of confidential data. 

Print Spoolers:

One of the major examples and concerns of spooling in cybersecurity is print spoolers, where hackers exploit printing devices by installing printing drivers. These drivers are usually corrupted and are used to inject malicious codes to gain access and control and cause problems in the computer device connected to the printer. 

According to a report, the cybersecurity company Kaspersky found that hackers conducted over 65,000 cyberattacks through Windows’ Print Spooler application from July 2021 to April 2022. This affected users worldwide, mainly from countries like Italy, Turkey, and South Korea. 

This shows the impact of spooling in the cybercriminal world and how difficult it gets for administrators to even recognize whether the system is hacked or not. 

Thus, via spooling, hackers can partake in multiple malicious activities against your systems and network, including: 

• Dropping files remotely using the spooler

• Installing a malicious printer driver

• Controlling the spooler to command it to print at a privileged or restricted location 

• Gaining code execution through the spooler files

Let’s learn more about how a spooling attack works to access and compromise sensitive business data. 

How do these Attacks Work? 

Every cybercriminal attack starts by trying to access the target system or network in the picture. The same is the case with spooling attacks. 

Here’s a step-by-step process of how a spooling attack works: 

• Firstly the attacker identifies the device or system that uses spooling to store data. These devices can include a printer, tape driver, or any other input/output device that uses the buffer spooling mechanism. 

• Next, the attacker can go around destroying the system in two ways. Firstly, he could send a large amount of files or data to a system using spooling, overwhelming it with multiple and consistent requests. This takes up a large chunk of memory of the device, limiting its availability and causing it to crash. 

• Or the attacker could create a malicious file consisting of malicious data or code and send it to the spool. The file could contain malware, and its code is executed once it goes through or is read in the spool. 

• The attacker can either trick a user into submitting the file to a spool or send it directly maliciously to the target spool system. 

• Once the system reads the malicious spool file and executes the code within, it leads to either malware execution, system crashing, or overwriting of legitimate data. 

• Now, depending on the purpose of the attack or the attacker, they can either gain unauthorized access to the system, steal confidential information, exfiltrate data, or cause damage to the system—completely disrupting its functionality. 

After a successful spooling attack implementation, it can disrupt your system’s operation and data significantly. Let’s learn about a few more threats of spooling attacks on your organization’s cybersecurity. 

How Company Networks Are Exploited?

Cyberattacks are a major threat to the organization’s cybersecurity as they exploit a system’s or a network’s vulnerabilities, responsible for operating input-output operations like print. 

Cybercriminals exploit the functionality of the system’s storing data in a spool, so it can be executed one by one for malicious purposes, such as: 

• Lateral movement: Once the attacker exploits the print spooler vulnerability, they easily gain access to the system and move laterally within the network, exploiting and compromising other systems and devices. 

• Ransomware: Cybercriminals can also deploy various types of ransomware throughout the network after gaining access to the system via spooling. They can cause significant financial losses and data disruption by compromising critical encrypted files and demanding a ransom in exchange for their release. 
• Data leakage: Hackers use spooling vulnerabilities to compromise sensitive business information, such as its historical financial records, confidential company documents, personal customer information, and intellectual property—leading to major data losses and reputational company damages: 

• Wide attack surface: As the print spoolers are present in several types of systems, including workstations, printers, and servers, it provides attackers a wide area of attack surface and entry points to an organization’s network—making it even more difficult for organizations to prevent this attack. 

• Legacy systems: Outdated software versions and old legacy systems aren’t updated with the latest security patches, making them more vulnerable and susceptible to spool attacks. 

So, what measures organizations must take to limit or remove the scope of spooling attacks and avoid falling victim to this malicious cyber threat? Let’s find out. 

Also read: Ransomware removal & checker tools to rescue your PC.

How to Prevent Spooling Attacks

As we discussed, spooling attacks are the biggest threats to the cybersecurity landscape and businesses all around the world, especially due to the challenge of quickly identifying or detecting their presence. 

However, you can prevent these attacks using a few robust preventative measures. Let’s find out how.

#1. Use strong passwords

Using strong passwords and implementing strong authentication procedures or password tools increases the difficulty and complexity of accessing company systems and networks for attackers. 

Hence, using strong, complex, and long passwords consisting of letters, numbers, and special characters is crucial to make it difficult for attackers to guess. At the same time, it’s also important to update the passwords regularly, either monthly or quarterly—reducing the window of opportunity for hackers to gain unauthorized access via compromised passwords. 

Additionally, implementing robust authentication protocols, like multi-factor authentication (MFA), biometrics, face or retinal scans, etc., helps further strengthen the system’s security—minimizing the risk of spooling and other malicious cyberattacks.

In spooling attacks, attackers often impersonate legitimate users, trying to gain unauthorized access to company systems and devices. If they compromise a legitimate employee’s login credentials, it becomes easier for them to spread malware or compromise the system for malicious means. 

#2. Encrypting spooled data

Using encryption algorithms and keys to encrypt the spooled data is another crucial measure to prevent the risk of spooling attackers and avoid data breaches and losses. 

Employing end-to-end encryption to the spooled data in transit ensures data security and confidentiality, even if an attacker intercepts it. Thus, secure encryption protocols, like HTTPS, SSL or TLS, VPN, or SSH, will help you protect and encrypt the sensitive spooled data in the system—preventing data exfiltration.

#3. Monitoring spooled data

Implementing logging and monitoring of spooled data plays a crucial role in preventing spooling attacks. 

Regular spooled data monitoring helps track spooling activities and enables real-time detection, analysis, and response to unauthorized and suspicious activities in the spooling process. 

With early detection, anomaly detection, pattern recognition, and user behavior analysis—regular spooled data monitoring and establishing real-time alerts help your organizations track and respond to spooling risks and attacks. 

Moreover, monitoring spooled data also helps ensure all the spooling activities are properly audited and logged. This is especially critical for compliance with internal policies and regulatory requirements. 

#4. Backing up spooled data

While backing up the spooled data doesn’t directly help prevent spooling attacks, it provides a means to recover from the attack and minimize its potential impact on the company. 

For instance, backing up spooled data enables easy data recovery, minimizing downtime risks and avoiding permanent data loss damages in case of successful spooling attacks. 

Besides, spooled data backup also enables ransomware mitigation, making it easier to restore the compromised and hacked spooled data—without the need to pay a huge ransom to the attacker.

#5. Restricting access to spooled data

Implementing robust access control protocols, like Attribute-based Access Control (ABAC) and Role-based Access Control (RBAC), helps restrict unauthorized access and ensure only authorized users or employees can access the system or submit spool files to the system. 

It’s crucial to enforce the least privilege principle to grant users access to only those necessary systems and resources they require to complete their tasks.

#6. Keeping spooled data up to date

Keeping the spooled data up to date helps address several data security vulnerabilities and reduce the impact of spooling attacks. 

Regular patch management and keeping the system up-to-date with the latest security patches minimize the attack surface for spooling attacks. Similarly, keeping the spooled data up-to-date also helps fix bugs and ensure high data integrity.

#7. Using a firewall

Firewalls and anti-virus software act as a barrier between your internal and external network, monitoring and blocking malicious traffic and files to your spool systems. 

You can use a firewall to block malicious traffic from suspicious, unknown, and unauthorized sources to your spool systems, allowing only authorized traffic and reducing the risks of spooling attacks. 

At the same time, keeping your firewalls up-to-date and configured with the latest security updates is crucial to ensure the utmost security of your company networks and systems.

#8. Using Intrusion Detection Systems

An Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is a software application or a device that monitors a system or a network for malicious activities or legal policy violations. 

Thus, by actively monitoring spooling systems’ traffic and activities, Intrusion Detection Systems enable early detection, insights, and alerts for signs of spooling attacks—enabling organizations to mitigate and respond to them quickly and effectively. 

They leverage anomaly and signature-based detection to set a baseline for normal spooling pattern behavior and trigger alerts in case of pattern deviation and suspicion.

#9. Using Intrusion Prevention Systems

An Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) is one of the most critical components of the network security strategy. It continuously monitors the network traffic in real time and takes action if it detects any malicious traffic or activity. 

While Intrusion Detection Systems only detect and alert about suspicious behavior, IPS also takes quick, immediate actions against those activities to prevent them from causing any harm to the systems—efficiently and quickly addressing attacks like spooling attacks. 

They use automated responses to automatically respond to the spooling attacks they detect by mitigating or blocking suspicious activities they detect. Besides, they also leverage traffic inspection, content inspection, request rate limiting, geo-blocking, protocol enforcement, and more to enable early detection and prevention of spooling attack risks.

#10. Be careful about what you click on

Often, spooling attacks are initiated with malicious links and phishing emails. Even the files or attachments the attacker sends into the spool contain malicious links, which, when clicked, can lead you to fake websites or trigger malicious software downloads. 

Hence, it’s important to stay cautious of where you click to prevent the risk of spooling attacks.

#11. Educate your employees about spooling attacks

Educating your employees about the potential risks of spooling is one of the most crucial preventative measures to avoid spooling attacks. 

It’s crucial to ensure that your organization’s staff is well aware of the latest cyberattacks and the threats involved with spooling. Hence, they’re better equipped with the knowledge to mitigate them. 

You can also conduct cybersecurity training to spread spooling attack awareness and train employees to identify spooling risks, signs of suspicious emails, attachments, and links, and ways to report or mitigate these risks to curb their impact on the organization’s systems and networks.

Be Safe!

Staying vigilant about the latest and evolving cybersecurity threats is crucial for businesses and organizations to avoid falling victim to malicious attacks and losing sensitive data and business information. 

Cyberattackers exploit the spooling mechanism by sending malicious traffic or files to the spooling networks and systems to gain unauthorized access and compromise confidential data. 

Gaining access to sensitive spooled data allows cybercriminals to compromise it in multiple ways and also implement other forms of cyber attackers, like ransomware, malware, or phishing attacks. 

We hope this article helps you gain insight into what spooling is, how spooling attacks work, and how you can prevent and mitigate it to avoid data breaches and risks mentioned above and ensure a robust network security posture for your organization.

Next up, the best cybersecurity compliance software to stay secure🔒.