Gone are those days when the installed printers at your office or home are just a device to print. Now a day’s printers are coming out with much more functionality. These are complex information devices which itself has multiple functions. But all this developments pave the way for cyber criminals to check out the vulnerability of these devices. One of the biggest matter of concern about printers and other multi-function devices are that when it comes to security almost all vendors are pretty ignorant. Especially in the age of cloud computing where every devices is networked and accessible around any public networks, these flaws can create a serious threat. A potential hacker can get into a company / corporate network exploiting printer network vulnerability. Even most advanced printers have very weak side when it comes to security. One such major concern is that every printer installed doesn’t prompt anytime to change the default admin password. This means these machine admin access will have normal default password. With a simple search online we can get the information about default passwords and usernames of almost any hardware vendors. Some web interfaces of printer admin panel even stores passwords in plain text format which is accessible by simple source code check.

Well so a simple gateway to corporate network will possible for bad guys.  So it’s the high time for all vendors and network/system engineers to take look at these issues seriously. Simple thing a system/network admin can do is to change at least the default password and username to a complex one and give emphasize and attention to these networks and track the network activity. Let’s not create an easy path any bad people around to exploit. Stay safe.

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