Recently Micele and I were researching for our talk about the current state of security of Multifunction Devices (MFDs). Since we’re both seasoned pentesters who are quite familar with MFDs, we were really surprised that very little new research is going on on the topic of MFD security. While diving deeper into the topic, we found a very simple explanation for this: As in 2002, it is still possible to download print or scan jobs using PJL, many devices still offer default FTP or Telnet access, and, of course, stored files can be recovered from MFD hard drives — on an enterprise wide scale. To even strengthen our impression of the current state of MFD security, most devices crashed or did go wild while performing some scans — and we do not talk about fuzzing here.
This devastating result lead to the question how MFDs can be secured. Since there are a lot of MFD hardening resources out there, even from vendors, we decided to put together a comprehensive hardening guide for MFDs. To raise the level of awareness, we put together a lot of examples on attacks on MFDs and then focused on the development of our own MFD security guide which is based on the seven sisters. The result of this approach can be found here. And of course, soon there will be a ERNW newsletter to cover this topic in a more academic and structured way 😉