Why print and scanning remain an unmitigated risk | Daily Reports Online
The paperless office is one of the clearest examples of the impact that digital transformation has had on workflows. This includes industries, like law and finance, where physical records of compliance documents, market-sensitive data, and customer information must be retained.
Industry Consultant at Tungsten Automation.
Mishandling electronic and physical data can lead to heavy regulatory penalties, so companies take care to encrypt data in transit, enforce MFA, segment their networks, and sharpen endpoint detection.
These measures build a solid foundation of security. But what good is that wall when the weakest link sits in the corner of the office, quietly printing?
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Regulated industries have a print security problem
Most offices treat printers as passive output devices, disconnected from any threat. That assumption is out of date. HP found 57% of IT decision-makers rate print security as a low priority in their cybersecurity strategy, and 45% aren’t confident their print environment meets compliance standards.
Whilst most print-related losses differ in complexity, they can be easily traced. Data leaks expose unencrypted hard drives and unpatched firmware, while print history can reveal when documents have been left sitting in the output tray.
Modern printers are networked endpoints with access to confidential cloud environments and increasingly, they’re managed by third-party MPS vendors, widening the potential attack surface.
Managed Print Services are useful for fixing hardware gaps, but they can introduce new risks. When print jobs are routed through third-party cloud servers without end-to-end encryption, files in transit become exposed. Granting an external MPS vendor administrative network access creates backdoor entry where even if only the vendor is compromised, attackers can easily pivot into the corporate network.
Singapore saw this play out in 2025, when a ransomware attack on a printing vendor for Bank of China’s Singapore branch exposed 11,200 customer names and account details. The incident is a clear example of how a print vendor can easily become the weakest link in an otherwise solid network.
Hybrid work adds another layer of complexity and few companies have clear governance for print behavior once it leaves the office. Office workers may have enterprise-grade tools, but remote workers don’t. Employees printing at home may be using unmanaged devices and unsecured Wi-Fi, offering little visibility into what’s being printed or where it ends up.
The compliance exposure under FCA rules
When two-thirds of knowledge workers assume network printers are secure by default, the likelihood of a printer-related breach goes from a matter of if, to when.
For UK financial services firms, this creates an operational and regulatory risk. The FCA has no statutory cap on fines, and its expectations around data governance extends to how firms handle information physically, not only digitally.
Regulators won’t distinguish between a breach caused by a compromised server and one caused by an unattended output tray; the obligation to protect customer data is the same either way. Conversely, a firm can encrypt data in transit, enforce MFA, and segment its network, and still face exposure if a printer or an MPS vendor becomes the point of failure.
Security starts at the print queue
Even as workflows digitize, printers aren’t going anywhere. Regulatory demands still call for hard copies and inked signatures, putting print infrastructure at the heart of broader conversations about automation and intelligent document processing.
Every print, scan, or routing job sits in between physical and digital workflows, making them a powerful lever for end-to-end process improvement. Cybercriminals know this too and lapses in printer security become an open door to confidential data.
Content-aware and cloud-based print management platforms close it. By doing away with physical print servers, they allow businesses to centrally manage printers, automate driver installs, and enforce secure “pull printing,” where documents release only once a user authenticates at the device.
Because many cloud based print platforms run in Azure, the same security governing email and Teams can extend to print. Documents are checked against content-aware rules that determine whether they’re printable or reportable, with flagged jobs blocked or escalated automatically.
Businesses can also go cloud-agnostic through S3-compatible integrations to avoid vendor lock-in, keeping secure releases separate from the product, so nothing installs on the printer itself and everything is managed remotely.
The last unsecured endpoint
Ultimately, security is a board-level concern, and printers need to be treated as the endpoints they are. That means extending endpoint detection and firmware patching to print fleets and extending governance to remote printing, even if that means restricting what can be printed at home altogether.
This is where visibility matters most. In third-party risk management, paper trails are supposed to tell a coherent story but rarely do. Evidence of oversight is too often scattered across email threads, physical documents, and local files. Vetting MPS vendors is how businesses close that gap, but the work starts with treating print infrastructure as seriously as any other endpoint on the network.
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