I recently had an unusual experience with a phone call that was claimed to be from our printer company. Purchasing and inventory received a call from someone overseas who wanted to perform a "security update" on one of our printers. Initially, I thought it was just a toner billing scam, but it seemed different. The person on the line asked for our inventory guy to walk up to the printer—a move that raised red flags for me since he has an IT background from the US Army and immediately recognized it as a scam. I want to know what their true intentions might have been. Given that HP multifunction printers require proper validation for firmware updates, was this a case of trying to man-in-the-middle our DNS or send malicious code over the network? What are your thoughts on this type of scam?
5 Answers
Printers can actually hold sensitive information like scanned documents and network credentials, which makes them a prime target for hackers. If someone gains access, they might try to exfiltrate data or hijack your email faxes. Definitely something to keep an eye on!
This sounds like classic social engineering. They could have started by having someone read off error codes, then ask for a remote connection to your computer. They usually try to ease into it instead of jumping straight to remote access, likely to avoid raising suspicions right away.
Yeah, I bet that's how they operate. They don't want to scare you off with a direct request; the whole 'printer update' angle is just to get you comfortable before they really go for it.
It's possible they were just fishing for information about your internal processes. Scammers often look for ways to trick people into believing they're legitimate—like by asking for a printer status page—and then they'll try to sell bogus service plans or something similar.
A common tactic is asking for internal information like printer model and serial number. They might aim to gather that data to make their scam more plausible. This kind of intel helps them sound more convincing if they contact someone else later on to push the scam further.
Totally! If they know the specifics about your equipment, they can really amp up the credibility of their scam.
For all we know, they could've wanted to revert firmware to a vulnerable version to exploit it. There are known vulnerabilities that affect older firmware types. Always better to be cautious and verify before doing anything at the printer's request!
True! And it's worth noting that if you have solid security measures in place, like password protection on your printers, it makes it a lot harder for them to pull off these scams.