Computers, servers and software are all protected. But printers? Companies don't think that easily. And hackers know that too. So they use the printer network to access your data. Tips to prevent that.
Only 18 percent of IT professionals consider printers as a medium or high security risk. This is the conclusion of a study by Spiceworks for HP. 12 American universities now know that the risks are there. In March 2016, their printers hacked . The result? A stream of racist messages ended up in the output trays of printers. The culprit was a hacker who found 29,000 internet-connected printers that he could use any automated process to perform any desired task through an open port.
A printer hack in which unauthorized print jobs are executed is still quite harmless. The consequences can be much greater. Examples are cyber criminals who forward faxes via unprotected printers, change information or control panel settings, perform denial-of-service (DoS) attacks to shut down devices, retrieve stored documents or electronically to the printer intercepted data. However, the greatest danger of a non-secure printer is that it can open the door to your network, giving hackers access to sensitive, confidential or private data.
And you don't want that confidential information on the street. Not only because it can be sensitive to competition, but also because the fines are not tender for customer data that is put on the street because of your fault. So it's high time to introduce secure printing. But how do you do that? 3 tips:
Good security starts with the device itself. Some printers are better protected against the risk of malware and cyber attacks than others. These devices signal attacks and repel them on the BIOS. In addition, white listing ensures that only known firmware can be loaded and executed on the printer. And the runtime intrusion detection checks the device memory for attacks and deviations. So pay attention to such security layers when purchasing printers.
Not only printers, but also the data that is sent to the printer must be protected against external threats. This requires user authentication when printing from a PC or mobile device. Each user must identify himself with a PIN or other authentication options before he or she can use a printer. Another advantage of this is that you also prevent a document that has already been printed from being left with the printer and ending up in the wrong hands.
Data encryption protocols help prevent print jobs from being intercepted on the way to the printer's memory. The control panel of the device can also be secured through authentication via PIN codes, biometric solutions or smart cards that must be used to gain access.
Following on from data security, it is also important to make employee behavior as risk-free as possible. This is because in practice it appears that many leaks are caused by careless behavior. A method that helps with this is is pull-printing . Instead of "pushing" a print job to a specific printer ( push-printing ), you send the print job to a dedicated email address. The employee then selects the most suitable printer where he enters a PIN code to start printing.
The advantage of pull printing is that a print job is stored on a secure server and only activated when the sender of the job identifies himself to the printer. Printers with physical locks and shielded input trays also help prevent loss or forgery of documents. With pull-printing and physical protection, behavior that endangers your data is eliminated.