Michael Howard, Chief Security Advisor at HP, says 71% of security breaches come from unsecured endpoints. Most IT professionals ignore printer security even though printers are everywhere on networks. Firewalls create false confidence while breaches keep spreading because companies don't isolate compromised devices.
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It is Robert Siciliano with IDTheftSecurity.com. I am here with Michael Howard from HP.
So your official title? My official title is I'm the Chief Security Advisor and Practice Manager.
Now you said in your presentation that 71% of breaches happen because of open endpoints. Correct. Can you explain that a little bit more?
Yeah, so I think what it is is there's a lot of endpoints in facilities today and we have a fault false sense of security around those endpoints. And that's where we're seeing the majority of breaches happen. And that's because of things like users that click on links. It's because we haven't secured all the protocols. We haven't locked these devices down. Because we're behind a firewall, people have a false sense of security.
And companies aren't really aware that their printers are part of those endpoints. In that, what, 18% of IT professionals believe that or are concerned about printer security and the rest aren't?
Right, that's what we tend to find is I think there's still, there's concern around it, but they don't have the resources and they tend to put it down lower in the priority list. So what we're seeing is printers are largely ignored on the endpoints sitting on networks and they can be the largest amount of endpoints that they have in a network.
And would you say that breaches are going to continue to rise at a sharp rate and much of that due to the fact that printers are not being properly protected?
Yeah, I think it's not only printers aren't being properly protected. I think we're definitely going to see the rise, but I think as security professionals, we have to look at doing more than just protecting the perimeter. We have to look at how we're protecting the endpoints and how we make sure that those endpoints can isolate a breach whenever it does happen so it doesn't spread throughout your environment. And until we really get the tools in place and we really help drive that, we're going to see the rise of breaches continue to go up.
