Do you know that #fax machines can be a "#backdoor" for #hackers?
According to a presentation at an international hacker congress in Las Vegas, fax machines threaten the cyber security of businesses. Researchers at DEF CON have voiced a number of worries about the ongoing use of faxes that have not come with the same encryption measures as modern, Internet -based technologies in today's businesses .
"Many fax machines have absolutely no security measures - absolutely nothing ," Yaniv Balmas, a researcher, told the #BBC .
Fax machines are usually connected to a company's internal servers and enable hackers who use the "weak point" in the chain to access a wider network and other sensitive data.
Although all-in-one printers, including scanning, copying, and faxing, are largely widespread across corporate offices, they are another group of vulnerable devices. American IT provider HP has published a patch for its printers, especially to improve the weaknesses of Balmas' research.
While faxes are becoming increasingly important in the face of e-mail and cloud-based storage services, this technology is still widely used in many professional environments.
This is partly due to the legal status of faxes, which are seen as visual evidence in court, unlike e-mails, which are seen to be more reliable or less prone to change.
The National Health Service in the United Kingdom - continues to use a wide range of pagers for communication with staff - it still has thousands of fax machines in use, and continues to grapple with security concerns after a massive cyber attack on health care in the past year.