There was a published sutdy a while ago where a hacker showed how they were able to infiltrate a network by imbedding code into an HP printer with a Jet Direct card. The obvious vulnerability would be exposing the data you send to the printer but the other less thought about vulnerability is malicious code being placed in the printer. This sub system runs an OS just like any other PC and has buffer space, etc. Depending on the functionality of your printer, most printers run some sort of print server type serivce. I have been running MAC address restrictions on my APs but will probably remove the feature in favor of a much much more secure scheme of 802.1x.Īs far as why you would want to protect your printer, it is every bit of a security vulnerability to your network as a regular PC. It can be more of a nuissance to deal with MAC address restrictions than any little security it provides. MAC address restrictions do very little to nothing in slowing a hacker. (If you can, set them to Infrastructure mode so they only accept traffic fromt he router.) This will add further security to your wireless connections to your printers as well, although if the printers are set to ad-hoc topology then they'll accept print jobs from any wireless device. Just copy/paste those into your MAC address allowed list. (Don't waste your time configuring this if you're using a D-Link as it probably won't work properly.) On LinkSys routers you can look at the clients list in the Status tab and it gives you the MAC address. Unless you're using a D-Link this should make the wireless quite sufficiently secure. I recommend you add MAC address restrictions to the router. The only risk I see is if your computer's connection to the router is using only WPA, because you might have your computer hacked then. I suppose someone might hack your wireless network and send a huge print job to the printer, wasting ink and paper, perhaps putting undesirable content on paper in your new place, but otherwise what can they do? I don't see that there is much risk in not having your printers secure. I doubt you could use a USB to Ethernet adapter on a printer as it requires driver software installed on the device you plug the USB connector into.
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