Hackers can steal data from the enterprise using only a fax number
Fax machines are still widely used by businesses and a communications protocol vulnerability is leaving them exposed to cyberattacks.
By Charlie Osborne | August 12, 2018
On Sunday at Def Con 26 in Las Vegas, Check Point Malware Research Team … demonstrated the existence of the security flaws in the HP Officejet Pro All-in-One fax printer range; specifically, the HP Officejet Pro 6830 all-in-one printer and OfficeJet Pro 8720.
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The vulnerabilities discovered included a stack-based buffer overflow security flaw and “Devil’s Ivy,” (CVE 2017-976), which permits remote code execution through database handling errors.
According to the researchers, an image file can be coded with malware including ransomware, cryptominers, or surveillance tools. Vulnerabilities in the fax machines’ communication protocols can then be exploited to decode and upload the malware payloads to memory.
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Check Point disclosed its findings to HP, which developed and deployed firmware patches in response … “The same protocols are also used by many other vendors’ faxes and multifunction printers, and in online fax services such as fax2email, so it is likely that these are also vulnerable to attack by the same method,” the team said.
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It stands to reason that as you have the ability to save an incoming Fax as a .tiff file on your system that the very act of receiving that “burst” of Data could well be laced with something that is persona non grata on your system. Strangely still use Fax albeit on my older Win7 Pro x86 machine (its the only one left at home with a Data Fax Modem) the Machines at work are just hooked up to POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) and don’t save to a Machine environment Phew! It raises the question really is there no end to the ways they can penetrate your system? Just lately have been musing here “is this a computer I see before me or is this a Swiss Cheese” because every time I check the mail and coming in here there’s a new exploit hence the Security more holes than a Swiss cheese analagy. Thx again for a timely warning although I have quite the dilemma what to do with this one, as occasionally I do share copy Fax .tiff’s to my main machine. Maybe M$ knew something about this a good few years back as the last version of Windoze that could share a Fax Printer was Win 2008 R2 server if memory serves me right, I have never been able to share Fax Printer in any normal versions of Windoze over the years, without an expensive Software option for Business.
