Navigating the waters of cyber security — the partially understood Multi-Function Printer fleet

According to PWC, there was an 84% rise in reported cyber incidents in Australia’s healthcare sector between 2019 and 2020. In 2021, 85 organisations reported data breaches in the first half of the year alone. This phenomenon is impacting healthcare globally. Healthcare is the number one target in multiple geographies, and it’s increasing at an alarming rate.

When we think of cyber-attacks and cyber attackers, we typically picture a hooded individual, hacking computers via the dark web. Think again. Remember, there are multiple doors for a data breach, some of them less obvious than others.

As organisations grow, so does the issue of managing an expanding printer fleet. In their Global Print Security Landscape publication, Quocirca’s discovered that in excess of 60% of enterprises suffer data loss due to printer security breaches. Don’t forget the unpretentious printer, sitting quietly in the corner. The less you know about it, the greater the risk to your organisation.

Any unknown aspect of your Multi-Function Printer fleet is a potential data breach, a likely portal for cyber-attack, and a very real risk to both clinical operations and patient care.

And the threats aren’t just external. The risks from within your organisations are every bit as dangerous as those coming from the outside. Not all data breaches are intended to have malicious intent. Picture the clinical notes left on a printer, the Nurses’ performance review sent to the wrong location, the unlocked printer tray containing blank prescription media, or the MFP brought from home and attached to your network. The list goes on.

Understanding your printer fleet has never been more critical to securing personal information, organisational data and maintaining safe, secure, and reliable clinical operations. What do you currently know about your printers? Where are they? If you know where, why is it there? Once the where and the why have been established, What type is it? Who installed it? Is it on your network illegitimately?

And it’s not just about cyber security. Having conducted thousands of fleet assessments, both from a technical, logistical, and clinical workflow aspect, our experience demonstrates that many MFPs are often found to be under or over utilised, inappropriate for the location they service, occupational health and safety hazards, not working, not where they should be, or simply missing in action.

So how do you manage this potential risk and gain back understanding and control?

The first step is mapping the vast waters that are your print fleet. A thorough technical assessment, combined with solid understanding of the healthcare environment is essential.

The second step is unifying your print infrastructure into a single, streamlined, fully managed service. This will establish real time, accurate understanding of potential risks, print behaviours, with the addition of predictive analytics using artificial intelligence to find problems before they strike.

When you are managing a fleet of MFP’s, assessment and centralised management will be your new safety and inefficiency digital radar. In an ocean full of pirates, a compass and a cutlass just aren’t enough.

^{1 Proven precautions to help protect health organisations and patients from cyberattacks
2 Cybersecurity firm Sophos report. “…The number of ransomware attacks on healthcare organisations increased 94% from 2021 to 2022”}

Image credit: iStockphoto.com/Davizro