Hackable Multifunction Printers a Weak Link in IT Security

By Michael Santo
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

Brendan O’Connor, a security expert at an unnamed U.S. financial company, warned at the Black Hat Security Conference this week that multifunction printers (MFPs), used at many corporations, are easily hackable and pose a security threat to many corporate networks. Note that I’m not talking about the printers we use at home, but ones that are the size of the cart you might place your microwave on (or larger).

Well, yeah. I knew about this long ago when I worked at a company that designed and built MFPs for many OEMs. Most of our printers used Windows (either NT or embedded XP) or Linux. All of these OSes are subject to viruses. If you had one of these OSes, particularly the Windows ones, on your desktop, you would most certainly put an anti-virus program on it. Did we? No, of course not.

You can read more of my thoughts and experiences here.