All-in-one printers can be used to control infected air-gapped systems from far away

Isolating computers from the Internet, called “air gapping,” is considered one of the best ways to defend critical systems and their sensitive data from cyberattacks, but researchers have found that can be undermined using an all-in-one printer.

Renowned cryptographer Adi Shamir, co-inventor of the widely used RSA cryptographic system, and researchers Yuval Elovici and Moti Guri from Ben-Gurion University in Israel recently set out to find methods of controlling malware running on air-gapped systems, subverting the goal of preventing Internet-based attacks. Theoretically, if a malicious program is installed on an air-gapped computer by an unsuspecting user via, say, a USB thumb drive, attackers should have a hard time controlling the malicious program or stealing data through it because there is no Internet connection.

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