This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of HP MPS. All opinions are 100% mine.
HP made a very clever series of commercials called ‘The Wolf’. The wolf is the attacker of a corporate enterprise, the sheep. We get to hear from the attacker as he compromises the printers, leaps to the computers and servers to get data about clients, employees, and everything else. The production level is movie theater quality and the message is worthwhile to demonstrate the security risk.
We have discussed the printer security risk previously on 404 Tech Support and HP’s commercials are bringing the topic to the forefront again. Additionally, HP provides some statistics that only 2% of the business printers in the world are secure. You may access the IDC Spotlight article on how to identify security gaps in your document infrastructure.
Printers are one of the most susceptible points of entry in a business’ IT infrastructure. More than 60% of companies recently surveyed have experienced a data breach involving their printers 1, and of all significant data breaches reported by IT managers, 26% involved their printers 2.
(#1 Ponemon Institute, “Insecurity of Network-Connected Printers,” October 2015. #2 IT and Print Security Survey 2015,” IDC #US40612015, September 2015.)
Printer security risks could be as elaborate as an attacker compromising the printer’s firmware or as simple as somebody picking up the wrong print job with confidential information. Back in the article Don’t forget printers in your IoT security, I listed that an attacker could target your printers with different goals in mind:
- Render the printer unusable
- Read documents with confidential employee or company data
- Move laterally from the printer to a different part of your network to compromise more infrastructure or access more data
The solution? HP Secure Managed Print Services. HP MPS offloads printer problems from your internal IT and partners with you to provide innovative hardware and software solutions. HP Secure Managed Print Services safeguards against device security, data security, and document security. There are many potential print-related security vulnerabilities that could impact your organization:
- Malicious threat from outside the company
- Exposure of documents at the device
- Exposure of documents sent to/from the device
- Unauthorized use
- Exposure of device settings or ports
- Company’s ability to identify the culprit of a security breach
- Remote/home print users
To learn more about the risks that unmanaged printers can present to your business, Watch The Wolf HP Video Series and check out the HP Secure Managed Print Services site.