- Jul 22, 2014
- 2,525
"Printers are everywhere!," and while a decade ago this would have been a good thing, as we've got more conscious about security, this statement is now a cause for concern.
There have been numerous reports in the past years that have induced a state of dread when it comes to printer security, but none as ominous as recent research published this week by three academics from Germany.
In their analysis of overall printer security, the three looked at different brands of simple and multifunctional printers, such as HP, Brother, Lexmark, Dell, Samsung, Konica, OKI, and Kyocera, which they collected from fellow faculty members.
Researchers created a tool to automate printer security testing
Using a custom-made tool called PRET (Printer Exploitation Toolkit), researchers automated local (USB), network (LAN), or remote (Internet) attacks on printers using both old and new security bugs.
The researcher team used PRET to run exploits that leveraged attack vectors via PostScript and Printer Job Language (PJL), two languages supported by most of today's major printer vendors.
The team showed that an attacker could gain access to a printer's NVRAM (non-volatile memory) and extract content such as sensitive documents, passwords, and others.
Furthermore, bugs found in multifunctional printers exposed more data, such as passwords for local SMB, FTP, LDAP, SMTP, or POP3 servers, with which the "smart" printer was configured to interact.
Other security flaws allowed the attackers to crash printers or cause damage to some of the printer's physical components.
More details in the link above.
There have been numerous reports in the past years that have induced a state of dread when it comes to printer security, but none as ominous as recent research published this week by three academics from Germany.
In their analysis of overall printer security, the three looked at different brands of simple and multifunctional printers, such as HP, Brother, Lexmark, Dell, Samsung, Konica, OKI, and Kyocera, which they collected from fellow faculty members.
Researchers created a tool to automate printer security testing
Using a custom-made tool called PRET (Printer Exploitation Toolkit), researchers automated local (USB), network (LAN), or remote (Internet) attacks on printers using both old and new security bugs.
The researcher team used PRET to run exploits that leveraged attack vectors via PostScript and Printer Job Language (PJL), two languages supported by most of today's major printer vendors.
The team showed that an attacker could gain access to a printer's NVRAM (non-volatile memory) and extract content such as sensitive documents, passwords, and others.
Furthermore, bugs found in multifunctional printers exposed more data, such as passwords for local SMB, FTP, LDAP, SMTP, or POP3 servers, with which the "smart" printer was configured to interact.
Other security flaws allowed the attackers to crash printers or cause damage to some of the printer's physical components.
More details in the link above.
