Tricerat Blog

PrintNightmare and ScrewDrivers®

Written by Tricerat | Sep 24, 2021 2:19:18 PM

The Problem with PrintNightmare

End users can no longer add their own printers or install their own drivers without IT intervention.

Who This Affects

Any organization that allows users add their own printers or install their own print drivers, which is most organizations.

How Tricerat Can Help

Due to how ScrewDrivers software installs its own virtual driver (print server management) and due to how ScrewDrivers sets up Direct IP printers, this does not affect ScrewDriver clients, as it does not require admin permissions to add printers with ScrewDrivers.

Testing The Fix

Tricerat’s technical team has tested with a Windows 10 machine, and made the adjustment Microsoft recommends to require admin rights for driver install. Once it was confirmed that our team was seeing the same behavior - clicking “add printer” and selecting a printer, causing a permissions window to display and prompt for admin username and password - our team tested with our Print Server printers and DirectIP printers without any issues, ensuring that this adjustment does not affect ScrewDrivers.

Simply put, when tested with ScrewDrivers, our team had no issues creating printers with the "admin rights fix" in place.

The team also tested adding a printer using login script to ensure it was using admin credentials to install the printer, and after confirming that, came to the conclusion that users pushing printers using GPO or script are also not affected.

ScrewDrivers® + PrintNightmare

While ScrewDrivers is not designed as a specific fix for PrintNightmare, it is a solution that is naturally unaffected. Tricerat’s proprietary universal virtual print driver ensures that an endless cycle of print drivers do not need to be constantly added to machines, thus allowing users to print freely without the need for local admin credentials.