Yesterday I read in the FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) that hackers are nowadays concentrating on hacking printers instead of workstations. To sum things up, the basic assumption is that important information will not merely remain in the digital form, but will soon or later printed. Especially in bigger companies, multi-national corporate giants, printing is done over the network.
To many hackers joy, the printers are not secured that well. Compared to workstations, servers or file-storages, the security measures aimed at keeping unauthorized access out is laughable. I did some testing with my Brother MFC 7820N Printer, which operates over the network here.

It is accessible by four access points, lays in the same subnet mask and ip-range. Pretty much easy to access, without a mac-filter or anything. A simple log-on form to control the printing activities and setup. It allows settings such as gateway, primary dns, wins-server, subnetmask et cetera. I have been reading rather a lot of articles recently at irongeek.com - one about cain and network ARP poisening. Catching a password over the network (either WLAN or LAN) is extremely easy and it merely depends on the network activities (if no-one surfs or access any sites, no secret information will be sent). Anyway the reason for typing down this text was actually only based on the fact that I wanted to upload my Network-Deployment driver for the Brother MFC 7820N with all settings and files embed (this means ip address and drivers pre-configured). If you want to build your own network-deployment driver, get the file at brother´s website at Brother.com

My network deployment kit is available here (not much usable for anyone but me I guess, still I am too lazy to Google the net for my printer driver whenever I re-install my OS or configure PCs around).