It's hard to imagine that the office printer could be the weakest link in your IT security infrastructure. But that's exactly what HP coming out saying today at a briefing announcing a system that would securely print sensitive document in corporate and government networks.
But first, let's start with some real scary FUD (fear uncertainty and doubt). As you can see in the slide (pictured), a group printer, which is often a multi-function printer (print, scan, fax and copy), can be used to reroute sensitive/confidential documents to an unknown location (Eastern Europe or students dorm were the one mentioned during the briefing), as a network sniffer or to send profanity messages to the printer users!

"We had an example of a University printer being used by students as a server to illegally share music on the campus. The printer was not password protected and none of the unused network protocols were disabled. And that's a big problem as printers now embed disk-drives and are actually Java computers vulnerable to hackers attack", says Michael Howard of HP's printing and imaging group.