This post was originally published in French only. We translated it in 2026 so the archive reads the same in both languages. Read the original →

For a brief moment, there was a storm around multifunction printers. Apparently it's the attack vector of choice now… And get this: you can make a printer explode remotely!

Lots of one-upmanship from people hungry for publicity. Printers as an attack vector have been known to security professionals for far too long already. Back in 2003, I was running penetration tests against printers that had a hard drive and Windows NT 4 inside. It was, and still is, possible to pull out printed documents or make the printer "panic" with a simple Nmap ;-)

So? When there's a bit of a news vacuum, you have to fill it fast and put a spin on it to rake in as much cash as possible! If it's not APT, it's cloud computing, or something else keeping the media busy.