Home Consumer If You’re Still Using A Fax Machine For ‘Security’ Think Again (Video)

If You’re Still Using A Fax Machine For ‘Security’ Think Again (Video)

Aug 22, 2018

While the human race, by and large, has moved on from fax machines, they’re still out there. The medical and real estate industries still cling to the technology — possibly because they believe its more secure or an easier way to get a signature from a client or patient. Well easier for them, the rest of us not so much. As for secure, turns out, that’s not true.

At this year’s Def Con, Check Point researchers Yaniv Balmas and Eyal Itkin unveiled how they infiltrated the HP Officejet Pro 6830 all-in-one printer/copier/fax. It’s important to understand that these machines are typically connected to a network. So if that piece of hardware is compromised, it’s a gateway to the rest of the computers and devices it’s attached to. Since the banking, legal and medical industries still use fax machines in their offices, that’s bad news.

The team encountered an impressive list of technical hurdles. The weirdest included finding out that HP’s firmware was using compression software built by Softdisk and was only used once before in the game Commander Keen. Continue reading

Video by Check Point Software Technologies, Ltd. on YouTube.com