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Forty per cent of Canadian companies have had a data security breach at some point, according to data by IDC. Meanwhile, 56 per cent of those breached said it happened through what seems like an unlikely source: the printer, which houses sensitive company data every day.

“Realistically, printers are the largest group of devices in an office setting and they have evolved so much,” said Calce, adding that many companies just pull the device out of the box and plug it in with default settings. “Hackers can pull all of the jobs from the printer’s memory or they can do many other things to run exploits like use some of the ports of the printer to gain access to the entire network.”

Printers and other Internet-connected devices are one of the biggest weak links to data breaches, according to Calce. It’s not just small-to-medium sized companies either, as major Fortune 250 companies are guilty of letting these devices fall through the security cracks.

“The problem is huge. I go into major financial institutions that are still using default passwords on printers,” said Colorado-based Michael Howard, chief security advisor and worldwide security practice lead at HP. “Largely printers are sitting on (company networks) unmanaged and unmonitored, and they don’t have any way to know if anything is going on.”

Howard advises some of the biggest companies in the world to think of every device that’s connected to the Internet — no matter how small — as a risk and to financially invest into proper security resources, in addition to changing the default settings.