RE: Securing Printers

["Yvan G.J. Boily" <yboily () seccuris com>]

Well, my simple argument is the instance where an attacker printed out a document on a network shared printer on a 
wireless network.
The attacker only printed the message "Your network is wide open".  Not a big threat for a home user, but scary enough.

Imagine a slightly different context where a disgruntled employee goes to an internet café, connects to the network 
printer, and
prints off a falsified email from co-worker A to co-worker B containing a pornographic image.  The printed document 
could be lying
around, Co-worker A and B get flak, potentially fired, and disgruntled employee is not a suspect.

A more serious instance would be if malicious attacker wanted to attempt a "phishing" attack, they could print out a 
"memo"
targeting a specific low-level or new employee from a higher level manager to take specific action.  The next person 
who uses the
printer would collect the document and potentially forward it on to the target user.

Just the possibility of this type of activity occurring should justify the assignment of a private IP address.

Yvan

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bryce Embry [mailto:embryb () k12tn net] 
> Sent: Monday, November 15, 2004 11:19 AM
> To: sec-basic list
> Subject: Securing Printers
>
> Howdy,
>
> A recent thread on BugTraq, along with some discussions with my 
> colleagues, has me curious about printer security.  What dangers are 
> there in giving a printer a public IP address?
>
> To me, a printer with a public IP sounds utterly foolish, but I'm not 
> doing a very good job of making this point with my colleagues.  They 
> usually respond with the question "Why would anyone want to print 
> something to a printer they can't even find?".  My answers 
> (usually "Why 
> not?" or "it's a system running an OS that is subject to 
> exploitation") 
>   don't seem to be very convincing, especially since I can't 
> produce any 
> known exploits.  I would appreciate any arguments and reasoning that 
> would carry more weight, or enlightenment to help me stop being so 
> paranoid.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Bryce