Of all the technology that you have in the office, your printers may not be at the top of your list of security concerns. This is a mistake, as an unprotected printer could easily serve as an access point to someone with less-than-righteous motives. To help correct this, we’re dedicating this week’s tip to improving the security of your printing solutions.
Understanding the Threats to Your Printer
There are a surprising number of ways that an unsecured printer can be compromised. Once something is printed, just about anyone could stroll on by and retrieve the paper. Print jobs could also be routed to other printers or manipulated, again breaking the chain of custody of the produced documents and potentially dispersing fraudulent data.
Data stored on the printer itself can also be harvested, and attackers have been known to use printers to infiltrate or directly attack a network system. Printing over Wi-Fi introduces similar security issues as well. However, printers still play an important role in most offices and other businesses today… So how can these threats be overcome?
By following some simple best practices, you may find that these security challenges aren’t quite so challenging to address.
Practices for Printer Protection
If you want to make sure that your own printing infrastructure is secure, you need to follow a few best practices:
- Keep your printers updated: Software updates are commonly released to help resolve potential security issues that may be within your technology solutions. In order to take advantage of these improvements, you have to actively apply these updates to the solutions you rely on.
- Implement access controls: Just as is necessary with anything that is connected to your network, your printing infrastructure needs to require some validation before someone can use it. Requiring access credentials that meet security recommendations is a good starting point.
- Require MFA: To further secure your printing infrastructure, you should also supplement your access controls with multi-factor authentication requirements.
- Disable unused services: The more services that you have active on your network (including those on your printing devices), the more access points there are for an attacker to take advantage of.
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