You might have heard in the news last month of the leaked selfie pictures from some high profile celebrity’s iCloud account, where their account was hacked and the photos stored in their iCloud account was publicised. Imagine that, all your private pictures and videos being shown the whole world! Can you believe that anything can be hacked, even Printers!! Well you may ask what can you achieve by hacking a printer?

First of well what is a hacker? A hacker is basically someone who finds a way to find some weaknesses in a computer system and do what they want with it. For example you can say that jailbreaking your iPhone device is like hacking your phone as you are exploiting Apple’s weaknesses. In the same way, a hacker recently hacked a Canon Pixma Printer and run the classic game Doom on the printer’s LCD display screen to highlight security vulnerabilities on printers.

Michael Jordon (from Context Information Security) is the man behind running the Doom game on the popular Canon Pixma Printer. The point of this hack was to show us that any computer device can be hacked especially the ones that we least expect to be hacked e.g. Printers, which can be valuable to malicious hackers.

So what if a game can be put on a printer’s LCD display screen, what’s the big deal about that? Well the hacker was just opening our eyes of the security vulnerabilities on technological devices. If a printer can be hacked to run Doom then think about what other nasty things hackers can do to your printer. Hackers can intercept your printing and get hold of your personal data. What if you print some private data and personal photos to your printer and if someone is able to hack into your printer and transmits the printed job to their printer and they have access to it. With things like wireless printers and AirPrint printers this can be possible. You may think that you have sent a print job to your printer (but it’s been transmitted to a hacker’s printer) and because it didn’t print, you click print again without any question. You won’t even know that your printer has been hacked! This should be something what businesses and organisations should be aware of as no-one will suspect printers at their work environment.

If a hacker can change the settings on a printer, the hacker can tell the printer to ask for updates from a malicious server containing all sorts of threats and viruses and the person installing the update to the printer will not be aware of that and just assume that it is coming from the official source. With the malicious update installed into your printer, your printing network is compromised. But remember, as we tell all our customers you should never update your printer and switch of automatic updates. If you update your printer, your printer will only accept original cartridges as the manufacturer will have planted something new on the printer to stop compatible cartridges and remanufactured cartridges from working with your printer.

Canon was good to promise an update to fix the security flaw on their current Pixma range printers and also on all their new Pixma range of products e.g. Canon Pixma MG7550 Printer, Canon Pixma Pro 100 Printer and Canon MX925 Pixma Printer will be updated to have a better security measure to prevent it from being hacked.

But even though Canon have just updated this because of the latest security threat to their printers, we at inkntoneruk.co.uk still believe that printer manufacturers like HP, Brother, Dell and Samsung still don’t give enough attention to security on printers as they just ignore it as there has not been a big issue publicised about it. We hope that printer manufacturers do take this ‘Canon Pixma Hack’ seriously and spend more time and money on improving the security on their printers.