As employees outfit their home offices with the necessary technology to continue to work remotely, printer sales have surged in the first eight months of 2020, leaving security experts to worry that the devices may open up companies' home-bound employees to attack.
An analysis by consulting firm Deloitte estimates that 2020 may see a 15% increase in sales of printers, with many stores seeing massive increases in sales and a depletion in their stocks. Remote workers often do not use strong passwords to protect the administrator account and may not have up-to-date firmware on the devices, which leaves the printers as a way into their home network and — using lateral movement through a company's virtual private network — into the corporate network, says Bob Burnett, director of B2B solutions and deployment planning at printer maker Brother International.
"The world changes a little bit moving to the home environment," he says. "Traditionally, if the user has put a device on their home network, they have a machine built for home use, and it may not have the security features of the same products deployed into the corporate network."
The threat is not theoretical.
At the end of August, a group of researchers sent a print job to a sampling of 50,000 of the 800,000 Internet-connected printers found through search engines such as Shodan.io, resulting in nearly 28,000 printers — or 56% of the discoverable devices — printing out their document, a single-page guide to securing the printer. The experiment of questionable legality led the group to conclude that about 450,000 printers are vulnerable to attack over the Internet.
Internet-connected printers are not the only danger ..
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