Rooting a Printer

I recall in the recent past a situation where plugging in a USB flash drive to a computer with Ubuntu installed would cause a wireless printer on the same LAN network to make a beeping sound. The printer in question was not added to the printer with the USB, nor had this computer ever been used to print anything before.

I did some Googling to understand how that could happen, and I didn't find much, except for someone claiming that there is a printer daemon that runs in Ubuntu by default and performs various plug and play notifications (I forget the details)?

I didn't have time to investigate more, but that experience made me wonder how many vulnerabilities there are silently laying around in a service that notifies printers about what I'm doing on my local laptop.

Australians: not what you thought it meant. Nothing to see here. Move along.

My HP inkjet printer lits its display in the middle of the night with no computers awake. I'm paranoid about it. Why does hp printers wake up display malware? After reading the Tenable article I am even more security paranoid about it.

Can we assume that this exploit works on most older HP printers?