The Evolution of Security Printing
With few exceptions, printers built since 2002 contain hard drives, much like your personal and business computers. These hard drives contain every document you have ever scanned, copied or emailed. This article discusses the progression of security printing and what your company can do to protect itself in a world of increasing data breaches.
An investigation on secure printing
In 2010, a landmark expose in the United States was presented by CBS News entitled Digital Photocopiers Loaded With Secrets. In it, the feature described the average business printer as ‘a digital time-bomb packed with highly personal or sensitive data.’
A news team went to one of 25 warehouses in the country to test their ability to access personal and ‘restricted’ information from the hard drives of printers. Some information were used to pick from a selection of about 6,000 printers, including the amount of pages printed and the price of the printer. Four printers were chosen and approximately $300 was paid for each.
In 30 minutes the hard drives were taken from the printers and a free forensic software program scanned tens of thousands of documents in under 12 hours.
Documents found included:
- Domestic violence complaints and a list of wanted sex offenders from a Buffalo, NY Police Sex Crimes Division
- Targets in a drugs raid from the Buffalo Police Narcotics Unit
- 95 pages of pay stubs complete with names, addresses, social security numbers and $40,000 in photocopied checks from a New York Construction company.
- 300 pages of medical records from a New York Insurance Company that included blood test results, cancer diagnoses, and drug prescriptions.
This article is consistently quoted in the security printing industry because the results were so substantial. The report alludes to a breach in national as well as personal security when it mentions that 2 shipping containers were being loaded with used copiers from that same warehouse and headed to Argentina and Singapore.
Hacks on uk businesses fall slightly, yet grow in expense
Fast forward to a 2015 article in Print Week entitled ‘Sloppy Security is Making Printing Companies Targets for Cyber Criminals’. Initially, the news in good. The Information Security Breaches Survey 2014, authorised by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills indicated that the number of large leaks in organisations in the UK decreased from 86% in 2013 to 81% in 2014. A five percent reduction is certainly good, but it leaves a lot of room for improvement.
Furthermore, data leaks are growing in expense, as quoted by Print Week author Simon Creasey, who states, ‘…while the number of attacks might be decreasing, on the flipside, the average cost of breaches increased significantly for the third year running. For small organisations the worst breaches cost between £65,000-£115,000 on average and for large organisations in the region of £600,000-£1.15m – any company, large or small, found guilty of contravening the Data Protection Act 1998 could be fined a flat rate of £500,000’.
The repercussions of security breaches are expensive and can damage the reputation of businesses. Colin Tankard, managing director at the secure data management company Digital Pathways states, ‘If you lose someone’s data they’re not going to use you anymore and word will get around, so you could end up going out of business’.
What to do to prevent security breaches
The effects of data leakage are substantial and potentially fatal for businesses. However, the solution is rather simple. Quocirca research indicates that a security assessment significantly reduces your chance for data loss. The next step includes implementing managed print solutions for your business.
Modern printers for business are offering options such as removeable hard drives, anti virus software, and secure release printing which restricts access to anyone but the user by requiring a passcode, or access card. There are image overwrite options, embedded faxes and auditing services that can tell you how much different departments or individuals are printing and what information is being printed.
The money invested in these solutions can be made back in the reduction of print spending, often eaten up by unclaimed print documents. Overall these measures are not only crucial for business security, they are a responsible, cost effective, green printing solution that benefits everyone.
Quocirca research indicates that a security assessment significantly reduces your chance for data loss. The next step includes implementing managed print solutions for your business.
Subsribe for updates and our latest research
You may be interested in
Taking Control of Print Costs Without Micromanaging Staff
The Hidden Cost of Office Printing Print costs have a habit of creeping up quietly: a few extra colour pages here, an unnecessary duplicate print there, a job sent to the wrong printer and reprinted. On their own, none of these feel significant. Across a whole office, over a year, they add up to a real and often invisible cost. See where your print spend is going PaperCut gives an Office Manager visibility and control over this without needing to police individual print jobs. In practice, this looks like: Reduce waste without restricting staff The…
Five Printer Security Risks Most Small Offices Never Think About
5 Print Security Risks Hiding in Your Office Following on from our earlier piece on printers as network endpoints, it is worth being specific about what actually goes wrong. These are the five risks we see most often when we assess a print fleet for the first time. The five print security risks to look out for 1. Default or shared admin passwords. Many devices are still running the password they arrived with, often known publicly for that model. 2. Unsecured print queues. Documents sitting in a print queue, or printed and left uncollected in…
From AI Experimentation to Real Business Outcomes: Our Takeaways from Microsoft Frontier Tour London
This week, Pete Graham, Microsoft Business Manager at Espria, attended Microsoft Frontier Tour London alongside members of the wider Espria team to hear directly from Microsoft leaders, partners and customers about the future of artificial intelligence. Having attended Microsoft’s AI Tour last year, Pete was interested to see how the conversation had evolved over the past 12 months. What became clear throughout the day was that the discussion around AI has matured significantly. A year ago, many organisations were still asking what AI could do. Today, the focus is increasingly on how to adopt it…
Critical PHP vulnerabilities: do you know who owns the fix?
When websites and applications sit with different teams and suppliers, the first challenge is knowing who needs to act. Critical vulnerabilities have been disclosed affecting PHP, a technology widely used across websites, web applications and other software products. The technical advice is clear: identify affected systems and apply the available updates. But for many organisations, the first challenge is understanding where PHP is being used, who manages those systems and who is responsible for taking action. To help you identify potential exposure, we have created a PHP Security Checker to determine whether your systems have…
Beyond the Filing Cabinet: What Document Management Actually Saves You
Document Management for Small Offices with DocuWare For many small offices, document management still means a filing cabinet, a shared drive with inconsistent folder names, and a lot of time spent searching for the one contract or invoice somebody needs right now. DocuWare replaces that with a structured, searchable system that sits behind your everyday paperwork. What does DocuWare mean in practice? Giving Office Managers time back For an Office Manager who is often the person holding the whole administrative process together, this is time back. Fewer interruptions to find a document for a colleague,…
Copilot vs. Claude
Why Microsoft 365 Copilot fits every day work A plain-English guide for people trying AI at work: what Copilot does, how it differs from a separate assistant such as Claude and where to start. The short answer Claude is a separate AI workspace. Copilot sits inside the Microsoft apps many teams already use and can work with the emails, files and meetings each person is allowed to access. A separate assistant helps when: Copilot helps when: – You need help creating or developing content from scratch. – The task is focused research, reasoning or code….