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Handler on Duty: Xavier Mertens

Threat Level: green

I Know What Your Office Equipment Did Last Summer...

Published: 2010-03-19. Last Updated: 2010-03-19 15:21:08 UTC
by G. N. White (Version: 1)

Yesterday there was a great article in the Toronto Star that discusses a potential security
risk that may not be obvious to some Business owners. You can find that article here.

G.N. White
ISC Handler on Duty

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1 comment(s)

Comments

I found this article an interesting read but thought it curious that the angle was along the lines of "this is what is on your office equipment that you don't know is walking out the door".
But in my experience, why wait for the equipment to leave to worry about data spillage? You can likely find these kinds of vulnerabilities currently online and alive and well within your infrastructure.
Almost all of the networks I have had experience with were configured such that anyone could print from anywhere to anywhere. Very few had any kind of authentication on the front end of these printers like a centralized print server with some kind of active directory implementation or logging. (This is also great from the standpoint of figuring what account was used to print documents related to possible data leakage incidents).
We always talk about how the insider threat is the bigger and harder threat to detect. It is clear how a vulnerability like this could take a company down and possibly never know how their their inner-most documents ended up in the hands of competitors.
Personally, I would love to see a story of an executive who hires a hacker-come-personal assistant whose job is to simply exploit these kinds of vulnerabilities and make sure the executive always has that "edge" that keeps him on point and on bonus.

_MM_

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