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Multifunction Printers — The Forgotten Security Risk?
eweekhickins writes to share an article in eWeek highlighting the forgotten risks that a multifunction printer could possibly offer. Brendan O'Connor first called attention to the vulnerabilities of these new devices at a Black Hat talk in '06 and warns that these are no longer "dumb" machine sitting in the corner and should be treated with their own respective security strategy. "During his Black Hat presentation in 2006, O'Connor picked apart the security model of a Xerox WorkCentre MFP, showing how the device operated more like a low-end server or workstation than a copier or printer--complete with an AMD processor, 256MB of SDRAM and an 80GB hard drive and running Linux, Apache and PostGreSQL. He showed how the authentication on the device's Web interface can be easily bypassed to launch commands to completely hijack a new Xerox WorkCentre machine."
Wasn't one of the first Mac viruses spread by a mac printer?
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
Are we going to have a bot net of machines that print our spam for us?
Remove the toner from the printer and you only get white hats.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The biggest issue isn't a lack of (software or physical) security regarding the machine, but a lack of a security policy in these instances. At our institution, machines have unique names, unique passwords (when they have to scan to a network drive), and are behind the campus firewall. But a user could get one, hook it up (putting it behind the firewall) and not change the default password and we'd 1) be none the wiser and 2) have no control over the machine. If a department gets one, it's their printer, not ours.
Still, with client-side antivirus and firewalls, and the control we have over the servers (for a multifunction printer to be able to scan to a server, it has to be given specific access, which doesn't happen lightly), it doesn't seem like being able to access the web interface can pose a whole lot of a threat. An attacker could potentially waste a ream of paper or two, a bit of toner, but I don't foresee any major consequences.
This is actually a very good point, a network is only as strong as its weakest link (or firewall). While each machine on a network may be secure, hijacking a printer can do the same amount of damage as hacking any other machine on the network (save actual servers w/ data on them). Imagine hijacking a printer on a network and then having it send out spam (hey, its on superreliabledomain.com, no reason to hastily toss it in the spam bucket), or arp poisoning to listen in on other traffic on the network it should have no business with. Any device connected to a network should meet a certain standard of security, it only takes one weak link to really mess things up.
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
As noted, this has been covered before. If you are not doing your best to segment your network for security reasons, then you probably deserve to learn about this one the hard way. EVERYTHING now has the smarts/hardware to launch/spread/spawn a virus attack on your network. Every day I get one or two messages about this and mobile computing being the 'number one' threat to our networks.
FerCrissakes, every USB stick has that ability if you have not done your work/research etc.
But still, by far, the most dangerous thing on your network is the end user(s)...
That's life, it's the way the cookie crumbles, and it's how you're going to lose brownie points with the PHB at work.
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My dot-matrix parallel printer will never turn on me like that!
Screeeeeeeech
Klingon programs don't timeshare, they battle for supremacy.
Lexmark, Xerox, the list goes on. How about a Linksys WRT54G? How many devices out there can be easily rooted and owned? The list is endless. Who would suspect a logon attempt or a slow port scan from a printer, or a volume-page scanner?
Maybe your VoIP system's very happy you linked it to your Active Directory with an administrative logon. Seen any weird LDAP requests recently? Had to reboot your RIP engine recently? Surprise!
Diligence is its own reward.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I'm calling you on this because I think it's very improbable without a laptop in the physical location. Sure it broadcasts like crazy in a LAN, but there's a HUGE leap from getting on the printer to turning it into your bot from a remote destination. Did the print server have a public IP?
Some details please.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Let's work with the concept that a multifunction machine get pwned for a moment. Instead of all the ideas of using it to root around on your servers, or join a botnet, what if the vulnerability did something as innocuous as FTP/SMTP (or even fax) images of scanned/printed documents to a server on the outside world?
Get a machine in a place that does financial or medical records and now you have a steady stream of confidential information going somewhere in the form of soc. security numbers, bank account numbers, etc. all in scanned form.
Since the machine probably already does this on a regular basis under normal use, it's possible that such an exploit could continue for a while before it would ever be discovered.
We have bunch of these Xeroxes that have - wait for it - an XP workstation hanging off them! No idea what the advantage to that is. You can't use it as a print server, because only ten people at a time can have a connection to it, so as soon as it starts to get heavily used, users complain that they can't connect to it. There's some kind of management console on it that allows you to reprint documents. Yours or your managers I presume. And the management console needs local admin rights to run.
So we run around locking down all the users workstations, but we have a shared workstation in the corner logged in as local admin with no screen saver. Thanks, Xerox! And they don't run Windows update either, you have to get patches from EFI, the compapny that builds the workstations and sells them to Xerox. We don't know how to support them, and neither do the Xerox reps.
So we create a server queue, that points to the workstation, that points to the printer. WTF? Where's the value added there? But we can manage our own print jobs! So? Why do you want to? You can't click print again if you need another copy?
And the drivers don't play nice. Very fun when you have over a hundred queues installed on each print server. the other day, they spent all morning trying to install drivers for one of these crap sandwiches. Every time they installed the driver the server would die.
And every floor has 3 or 4 of them, because each department needs their own. so half of them are totally underused. But we're saving money on all the printers we replaced! You mean the ones that migrated to users desks? We have people with a Laserjet 8000 sitting on a table in their office, sucking up power and $90 toner cartridges, so Manager McPrivileged doesn't have to walk down the hall to print out his 5 emails a day.
We keep telling the Xerox sales rep that we hate her. She thinks we're kidding.
We have a $45,000 high quality high volume scan/printer that is a paperweight.
They purchased it for scanning confidential documents. The hitch is that there is only 1 way to get documents off of this printer: A public non-protected network share... This is basically against the law for a bank.
I suggested that I could set up a private network and they could securely upload docs to the proper place with the right security, however that plan was nixed for being "non-standard"
The result is that now they consult me when buying a pencil sharpener because they don't know how it will affect network security.
What you are describing is an EFI Fiery RIP. This is not just a "workstation hanging off of the printer." It is doing the actual work of rasterizing the Postscript. Get rid of it, and your Xerox is not even a dumb printer. It won't print at all.
EFI Fiery controllers generally run a version of XP Embedded, which is itself locked down in a variety of ways, but sometimes not. They often have a proprietary motherboard with unique RIP hardware. We have several here. One, driving a Canon CLC 4000, does not even have enough of Windows present to install a driver (VNC in this case).
Another, driving a Konica BizHub Pro 6500 is almost wide open, except that we actually had to pay for the privilege of hooking up a monitor and keyboard. That's right, they flash the motherboard in such a way that the machine is headless, unless you pay extra.
Mir tut es leid, Menschen daß Einfältigfehlersuchenbaumfolgendenaffen sind.
Many larger/more sophisticated printers these days have a "print to mailbox" option that causes the document to remain spooled on the printer indefinitely instead of immediately printed. You have to be physically at the printer and enter your user ID and PIN to start your print job. So that mitigates the hanging around the printer attack, still doesn't help if the printer gets r00ted though.