Network printers going crazy! printing garbage

[Diesel8000]

For some time no our network printers will start printing all on its own. Its seems a file, Book1.xls is generated somehow, and saved on one of our server's network drives, and printed repeatedly.sometimes this happens repeatedly on a day, and some days, not at all. We recently replaced all the computers in the office to eliminate the compliancy problems. Yet, the printing continues. It seems the problem only originates when the personel is at office,and prints only 2 or 3 7's on a page. The command to print originates from different computers on the network, but it seems all of them prints the same file, book1.xls, which is 69 pages in total, and it repeats the print command more than once at a time
please help with some fresh thought on the matter.feel free to ask additional information if you have an idea to what it can be!


What can this be?

 

[eitai2001]

Printer virus?

 

[Diesel8000]

possible, but what famliy of viruses can one start to look for, and where? We have symantec client security and symantec mail security installed on the server, with all the client computers having the symantec client installed on them, up to date virus definitions, even had AVG running parallel on a few "problem" computers. We are able to track which computer gave the print command, strange thing being, 8 out of 10 times, there is nobody working on that computer at that time.

 

[Turiko]

Sounds like either one of 2 things:

1) a virus or some form of malware
2) someone indeed printing the document without realising it i.e. hitting the wrong place with the mouse, etc..

and a bit of advice, AVG is a piece of crap. You could do much better than AVG as an anti-virus.

 

[eitai2001]

Sounds like either one of 2 things:

1) a virus or some form of malware
2) someone indeed printing the document without realising it i.e. hitting the wrong place with the mouse, etc..

and a bit of advice, AVG is a piece of crap. You could do much better than AVG as an anti-virus.

Hey hey hey !!!! ... Don't dis AVG, it may not be the best, but its not the worst ... its saved my @ss a few times

 

[werner]

it took me a while to remember this name, but our office got infected with bugbear a few years ago.

we came into work one morning and all the printers were out of paper....bugbear copies itself to network shares, and as the printers were shared they all merrily kept printing out the code for bugbear through the weekend.

sounds like you have something similar going on there. most definately a virus. and as quite a few of them are now capable of shutting down processes (including avg) i wouldnt count on the antivirus to be clever in this situation.

some background on bugbear..
http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/tanatos.shtml near the end, under "side effect"