The big lesson from the huge security flaw in Brother printers

Last week, worrying news surfaced for millions of printer owners: Over 689 models of Brother printers are open to attack, along with 53 additional models made by Fujifilm, Konica, Minolta, Ricoh, and Toshiba. (As if dealing with home printers wasn’t already enough of a headache already.) Worse, eight different flaws are exploitable, with one unpatchable.

The problem: The default administrator password on Brother printers (and those using Brother components) can be guessed, in part by exploiting other vulnerabilities in these devices. But a firmware update won’t be able to address this issue, as what your printer ships with is already set. 

Fortunately, you can fix this problem yourself by changing the default administrator password. Also make sure you update your printer to patch the other seven bugs—through them, a bad actor could steal stored scans, look at your saved contacts, change your settings, and even execute commands.

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The lesson here? Always change the password when setting up a new device. Think not just printers, but also routers, baby monitors, and anything else that ships with a default username and password. Manufacturers now give devices unique passwords (unlike the dark ages where all models would use password or nothing at all), but as this Brother incident illustrates, the practice doesn’t guarantee truly random, secure login info.

This task is easy with a password manager—it handles the work of generating and remembering random, strong passwords for you. Because a secondary lesson is that if you create passwords by taking part of a phrase or word related to the app or website, adding something extra to it, and then calling it a day, whatever you’ve come up with is likely too weak. Brother’s method was similar (though with some extra steps), and… well, here we are.