Printer Zone

Firewalls, Intrusion Prevention Systems, Virtual Private Networks, Encryption, and Authentication are all frequently mentioned and considered when discussing enterprise security. Data security typically involves protecting key infrastructure like servers and databases. Printers aren't typically on our minds. In spite of the fact that billions of dollars are spent annually on security around the world, how much did your company spend in the past year to ensure that its printers were safe to use? If you too responded "0," you'd be in the majority.

Since their widespread introduction in the late 1970s and early 1980s, printers have undergone significant development. In the past, each printer had to be directly connected to its own computer, which meant that each printer could only handle one print job at a time. Modern printers have become into sophisticated machines with many useful features. In the modern era, printers can do much more than just print; they can also scan, photocopy, fax, and even email documents. Many people, including common users and even system, network, and security professionals, have no idea how or what a printer actually does. When asked to describe a printer, the majority of people still picture machines 30 years ago, when they were merely dumb machines with the ability to print. This is a totally incorrect assumption.

Both high-volume office printers and low-cost multifunction printers for the home are included in the scope of this article's discussion of printers. It's unusual to come across a printer, no matter how little, that does nothing but print. Most at least offer faxing and scanning, both of which call for more capacity. In-device buffering is necessary for all scanning use cases, including scanning an entire page in advance of printing, scanning to save as a PDF or equivalent file, and scanning to enable faxing. A buffer is a section of memory used to temporarily store information. A digital copy of the document you are printing, scanning, or faxing is temporarily stored in this buffer. This buffer can be anything from a few bytes of Random Access Memory (RAM) to an entire hard disk drive in a high-end computer. This buffer is not the sole memory store present in larger commercial printers. Larger amounts of data can be stored indefinitely in the non-volatile memory. Some printers, for instance, have built-in scanning capabilities and can save the scanned document in PDF format. The user can then access the printer through a web page or by connecting to it as though it were a network disk.

When will we finally get to the point? A breach of business security that allows private or proprietary data to escape. Although many large businesses have data retention and disposal policies in place, these rules rarely cover printers or even make reference to them. When formulating their data destruction policy, businesses consider all potential storage media, including paper documents, digital files, and the hard drives of employees' desktop computers, laptops, and servers. Even while it's obvious that they recognize hard drives as repositories of important data, they probably never give much thought to the hard disks—if any—that may be lurking in their printers. While developing and implementing security policies, procedures, and recommendations, printers are often forgotten. We give printer security and the consequences of its absence almost no thought in the workplace. When you think about the kinds of paperwork that routinely go through office printers, the implications become even more unsettling. Documents can range from private client information to highly technical network diagrams, depending on the industry and the specific needs of the firm.

Understanding the corporate environment, the security measures within that environment, and the overall flow of information between users, printers, and file systems that contain restricted data is necessary for comprehending how sensitive data is spilled via a simple printer to the outside world.

Source: PrinterCentral