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Dave Taylor here and I want to talk about something called Print Nightmare
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This is an exploit in the wild that is using the Microsoft Windows Print Spooler to sneak
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onto your system and do nefarious things. Now Microsoft has actually tried to fix it a couple of times
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So they issued a patch, then they issued a second patch, and now they've come out and
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said none of those quite actually solve the problem. So this is something that probably isn't going to be a problem for you, but it might be
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And so it's possible that you will feel more safe and more comfortable if you actually
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protect yourself from this. And the way to do that is turn off your Print Spooler
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So let me show you how to do that really quickly. It's actually pretty easy
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So you want to launch PowerShell and make sure you run it as administrator, which means
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that it's going to then prompt you to grant permission. Yes, you want to do that
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And you can see I have mine. It's pretty big type because I want to make sure you can see what I'm doing
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So the first command you want to do is you want to turn off the current Print Spooler
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And that's done by stop service space minus name spooler minus force to force it to stop. Ready
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It stopped. Now, the issue is that next time you restart, your spooler will start up again too
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So you haven't really solved the problem. You've just sort of temporarily given yourself a break
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Now if you never reboot or never restart or are really good at remembering things, you
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can stop here and you're done. But for a lot of people, you also need to turn off the restart on boot
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So that's done with a very similar command. This one's set service minus name spooler
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But then this part's a slight bit different. So it's start up type and then disabled
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Press return. Done. That's it. So now you've protected yourself from Print Nightmare, but the cost is, as I said, you
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won't be able to print because your Print Spooler is now shut down
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I think that's probably a reasonable trade-off because if you're like me, you print a piece
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of paper probably once every few months. I mean, we live in a paperless digital age, right
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So that should get you going. You can now close PowerShell and you're done
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You can close this particular security notice because it doesn't apply to you anymore
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That's it. I hope this was really helpful.
