Your Printers Are Part of Your Attack Surface. Here's How to Secure Them.
You’ve invested in firewalls, endpoint protection, identity management, and security awareness training. Then there’s a multifunction printer sitting in a shared hallway, running firmware nobody has patched in two years, quietly storing copies of everything that passes through it.
That printer is a networked computer. It stores data, transmits documents across your network, and runs software with its own vulnerabilities. Yet in most organizations, it’s the one endpoint that never makes it into the security plan. Attackers know this. It’s time the rest of us caught up.
Why print is the gap
Printers get overlooked for a simple reason: they don’t look like a risk. They’re furniture. But consider what actually flows through a modern fleet:
- Documents at rest. Many devices cache print, scan, and copy jobs to an internal drive. Without proper handling, that data persists.
- Documents in motion. Print jobs travel from the workstation to the device — often unencrypted, where they can be intercepted on the network.
- Documents on the tray. The most common exposure isn’t exotic at all. It’s a confidential file sitting in an output tray where anyone walking by can read it or pick it up.
- The device itself. Outdated firmware, open ports, and default credentials turn a printer into a foothold inside your network.
The result is a category of risk that’s both common and quietly serious — and, in regulated industries, a direct compliance liability.
What a secure print environment actually looks like
Securing print isn’t about buying one more product. It’s about applying the same discipline you already apply to the rest of your endpoints. Four controls do most of the work:
1. Hold jobs in an encrypted queue. Nothing prints the instant someone hits “print.” The job is encrypted and held until the right person is physically at the device. This single change eliminates the unattended-tray problem and protects documents in transit.
2. Authenticate at the device. Users release their jobs with a PIN, badge, or mobile credential. Anonymous printing disappears, and every job is tied to a person.
3. Log everything. Per-user, per-device, per-job records give you the audit trail that compliance frameworks require — and that incident response depends on.
4. Manage the fleet like endpoints. Firmware updates, security policy, and continuous monitoring, enforced across every device rather than left to chance.
Built on platforms like HP Wolf security and HP Security Manager, these controls can be applied fleet-wide without slowing anyone down.
Why we think about it this way
At AxioPrint, securing print isn’t a feature we added to a copier business — it’s where we start. As a sister company of Axio Networks, a managed IT and cybersecurity firm, we approach print the way we approach any other part of the network: as something that has to be secured, monitored, and managed. That’s the difference between a print vendor and a security-minded print partner.
Where to start
You can’t secure what you can’t see. The first step is understanding what’s actually on your network and where it’s exposed — which devices are out of policy, which are running stale firmware, and where confidential documents are landing.
A print security assessment gives you exactly that, with no obligation. If your printers have been the one endpoint nobody’s looking at, now’s the time to change that.