Printers are Hackable: Here are Essential Security Features to Consider for your Next Business Printer
by Ashok Pandey October 28, 2021 0 commentsPrinters are the new potential targets of hackers, according to Quocirca’s report Global Print Security Landscape, 2019. The report stated that 60% of businesses in the United Kingdom, United States, France, and Germany suffered a print-related data breach in the last year.
If you don’t have a cybersecurity plan in place for your connected printers and networks, then hackers can easily breach your printer, which in turn can lead to huge data and business loss.
To demonstrate the vulnerability of printers, cybersecurity experts at Cybernews used IoT (Internet of Things) search engines to scan open printer ports. The cybersecurity team were able to find a whopping 800,000 printers that had Internet-accessible network printing features enabled. Surely, all of them were not hackable, however, they calculated that probably 500,000 of them could have been targeted for hacking.
Security Features to look in your business printer
The thought of a printer getting hacked may not occur to everyone, but it’s important not to report some of the reports. Here are a few security features you should look out for before buying your next business printer.
Real-time detection – Real-time detection has become need of the hour. Whether it is your PC, printer or any other device connected to the Internet, having the capability to detect malware attacks in real-time can save you from potential breaches.
Trusted Platform Module (TPM) – The TPM can safeguard sensitive user data. The small hardware sits in your machine and enables secure storage of information including passwords and security keys. It protects your device identity so it can’t be spoofed or copied. It ensures protection of data that’s received and also ensures that data being sent from the device reaches the intended destination.
Automated monitoring – Comply your printer with security policies by providing ongoing assessments and automated remediation. You can decide and schedule assessments: daily, weekly, or monthly to identifies and report non-compliant features during each assessment. The security solution automatically applies policy to the features.
Run-time Intrusion Detection – This feature detects anomalies in the system memory and protects the device when connected to the network. This smart feature detects any malware intrusion attempts during complex firmware and system memory operations.
It validates the memory space and in case of any modification, prevents memory corruption. When it detects any intrusion, the solution cancels all pending print jobs automatically and restart the printer to return to a secure state.
Software validation – The printer software coordinates with hardware function and provides security as well. The software validation ensures that your printer has the latest firmware version.
It whitelists authentic codes, solutions, and third-party solution and loads them into memory and operates the printer. In case of authentication failure, it won’t let the printer load the files, preventing a potential malware exploit from executing.
HP business printers, for instance, HP PageWide Managed Color Flow MFP E58650z, comes with built-in security features that include – HP SureStart, Whitelisting, Run-time Intrusion Detection and more.
Check out https://store.hp.com/in-en/default/hp-business-offers for some good deals by HP.
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