Empowered Patient Podcast Why Hospital Printers Have Become Targets for Cybercriminals with Jim LaRoe Symphion
Jim LaRoe, CEO of Symphion, highlights an often overlooked cybersecurity threat posed by network-connected printers in a hospital setting. Modern printers are complex devices with numerous features that create vulnerabilities and potential access points to patient and hospital data for cybercriminals, yet they are generally managed outside of the IT security environment. The first step in ensuring printer security is to determine the number of printing devices on the network, their locations, and their configurations. Additionally, it is essential to ask the IT team to demonstrate security hygiene for the entire printer fleet.
Jim explains, "We personally were exposed to the print industry in about 2015. And we noticed that the printers are really essential for patient care. They process, store, and transmit the most sensitive data, but they have grown up outside of the information security and supply chain. The security has been left vulnerable. In today's cybercrime growth industry climate, where opportunistic criminals are looking for opportunities to steal data, ransom, or attack patient care, you've got a real recipe for disaster. So really, we're facing a whole lot of issues that relate to the vulnerability of the printer."
"They're absolutely very complex business machines, and the manufacturers for the last 40 years or so, from what you're talking about, the analog days, have really enriched them with incredible features beyond the camera, the document sorter, and things like that. They built in incredible web server features, email servers, fax servers, FTP servers, like a Dropbox that we all use for heavy payload communication protocols. They built all those features into the devices, and they built in ways to secure those features, but they haven't been used, and they're not being used on networks."
#Symphion #Hospitals #PrinterSecurity #Cybercrimes #NetworkSecurity