From the comments it seems that it's people sharing their printer, apparently some form of access over the internet (or local network).
Given that these are connected to Airports, they are probably using Back to my Mac:
Printers are spontaneously printing odd "SQL" strings
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Re: Printers are spontaneously printing odd "SQL" strings
#22I've got a HP printer pretty similar to the one mentioned in the thread. In the course of trying to set it up, I by chance pointed my browser to the printer's network printing port. Interestingly enough it printed out all my browser headers. It seems like these printers just spit out anything that hits that port.
Yes, I used to do a netcat on printers to print for free in college.
Re: Printers are spontaneously printing odd "SQL" strings
#23I'm waiting for the great network printer security apocalypse. A bunch of these things are in a great position to turn around and launch attacks on the "chewy on the inside" networks of so many companies. Maybe this has already happened. My printer has a dumb little print server running an embedded flavor of Linux and a publicly known hard-coded (!) root password. While mine is going to the slag heap sooner or later…
These two 28C3 talks[0,1] discuss the precursor to such an apocalypse.
[0]: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2011/Fahrplan/events/4871.en.h...
[1]: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2011/Fahrplan/events/4780.en.h...
Re: Printers are spontaneously printing odd "SQL" strings
#24There are known attacks on printers eg via firmware upload https://lwn.net/Articles/469865/
Although this mostly looks like scans.
Re: Printers are spontaneously printing odd "SQL" strings
#25> "[...] we're all forwarding port 9100 or 631 to our printer to allow ourselves to print from outside the network, which sets up an HTTP server at that address open to the internet. All it takes is for somebody to put the appropriate GET request in [...]" > "Both of our printers have public IP addresses" It looks like the printer are publicly accessible, and some automated tool (nmap?) is just scanning them for vuln…
Agreed, I've seen this before as well. I doubt it really has anything to do with Apple and likely the HP printer server software instead - being directly related to an nmap scan.
Re: Printers are spontaneously printing odd "SQL" strings
#26Spoke with a a security guy years ago who got called to a company after they'd been accused of running a warez server. After a bit of digging around he finally found the server on a printer that was running some ancient un-patched version Solaris.
Re: Printers are spontaneously printing odd "SQL" strings
#27Files are compressed. Songs are programs with a simple musical notation. They put graphics and stuff.
Re: Printers are spontaneously printing odd "SQL" strings
#28I once found a public printer which I don't think was supposed to be public. There wasn't any way to contact the owner since it appeared to be in a different country based on IP address. ...so I set it up as a printer and printed a bunch of lolcats to it.. A few days later it wasn't accessible any more =)
You could have, you know, printed out that the printer was publicly accessible on the printer itself.
Re: Printers are spontaneously printing odd "SQL" strings
#29In the printed stuff it also says 'nmap'
Most probably it comes from someone running penetration testing tools against the printer on the network
Re: Printers are spontaneously printing odd "SQL" strings
#30I once found a public printer which I don't think was supposed to be public. There wasn't any way to contact the owner since it appeared to be in a different country based on IP address. ...so I set it up as a printer and printed a bunch of lolcats to it.. A few days later it wasn't accessible any more =)
You could have, you know, printed out that the printer was publicly accessible on the printer itself.
Yeah, that was part of the lolcats image. I can't quite remember what I did but it wasn't malicious.