I'm waiting for the great network printer security apocalypse. A bunch of these things are in a great position to turn around and launch attacks on the "chewy on the inside" networks of so many companies. Maybe this has already happened.
My printer has a dumb little print server running an embedded flavor of Linux and a publicly known hard-coded (!) root password. While mine is going to the slag heap sooner or later for that and several other fundamental problems, you can guess that many many more of them are out there just waiting to be taken for a ride.
These dumb little boxes may be underpowered, but once you get inside and set them up to forward packets for you, their raw CPU speed becomes less of an issue. You can run all of the fun attacks from a "real" machine and just let it bounce you to the inside world.
My very first criminal act of hacking as a teenager was gaining access to a printer somewhere in Spain, by which I had limited access to the rest of the network but I was too dumb to understand what to do.
So yeah, printers at least were a big gaping hole in the late 90s and early 00s.
My printer has a dumb little print server running an embedded flavor of Linux and a publicly known hard-coded (!) root password. While mine is going to the slag heap sooner or later for that and several other fundamental problems, you can guess that many many more of them are out there just waiting to be taken for a ride.
These dumb little boxes may be underpowered, but once you get inside and set them up to forward packets for you, their raw CPU speed becomes less of an issue. You can run all of the fun attacks from a "real" machine and just let it bounce you to the inside world.
Hypothetically speaking, of course.