Printer security: Is your company's data really safe?

  • 12 June 2016
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Userlevel 7
By Lamont Wood                         
 
IT managers have found that printers can pose major cybersecurity risks -- assuming they pay any attention to them at all.
 
On March 24th of this year, 59 printers at Northeastern University in Boston suddenly output white supremacist hate literature, part of a wave of spammed printer incidents reported at Northeastern and on at least a half dozen other campuses.
This should be no surprise to anyone who understands today's printer technology. Enterprise-class printers have evolved into powerful, networked devices with the same vulnerabilities as anything else on the network. But since, unlike with personal computers, no one sits in front of them all day, the risks they introduce are too often overlooked.
 
full article here:

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Userlevel 7
Hmmm...I am not convinced by the rationale expoused in this article given that most enterpris-based printers I have come across are generally attached to an enterprise network that should itself be protected from attack/intrusion by various safeguards, such as firewalls, antimalware apps, etc.
 
Who in their right mind would directly connect their printers to an open network or internet and then expect not to have issues?

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