HP Print Drivers Slash Malware – TMO Daily Observations 2020-10-27
John Martellaro joins host Kelly Guimont to discuss a technical issue that causes HP printer drivers to appear on your Mac as malware.
Show Notes
- Daily Observations Archive
- HP printers
- The Eclectic Light Company – Macs, painting, and more
- Eclectic Light Company Founder Dr. Howard Oakley - TMO Background Mode Interview
- Security Friday News and Articles
- "HPxxxxx.framework" will damage your computer" message - HP Support Community
- Background Mode Podcast Archives
- TMO Daily Observations Twitter feed
On Thursday, 22 October 2020, our two home iMacs running 10.15.6 stopped printing to our HP printer. Print window said it could not open a file in the “/private/var/spool/cups/tmp/” folder. There was NO alert about malware on either computer. Restarting did not help. Deleting the printer and re-adding it did not help in 10.15.6. One computer was upgraded to 10.15.7 but it still could not print. I then downloaded the latest HP printer driver for our model and installed it on the 10.15.7 computer. Printing worked again. The same driver was then installed on the 10.15.6 iMac (whose printer had not been deleted) and that Mac also then printed fine. While Apple and HP had a noble goal, automatic updates are inherently dangerous. Remember the time that Apple installed a bad Ethernet driver and killed network access for computers that had been upgraded. And since they had lost network access there was no way to easily fix this issue with another update. Updates can go wrong. Even by Apple.