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Alarming Vulnerabilities Found in Widely Used Printer Models
A sweeping security review conducted by Rapid7 has uncovered a series of high-impact vulnerabilities affecting hundreds of printer and scanner models manufactured by Brother Industries, Ltd. These flaws extend beyond Brother devices, impacting equipment from other prominent vendors including FUJIFILM, Ricoh, Toshiba Tec, and Konica Minolta. In total, 748 models have been identified as vulnerable to potential remote exploitation, elevating the urgency for businesses and users worldwide to take swift protective actions. The most critical flaw allows attackers to bypass authentication completely, hijack devices, and access sensitive systems.
Massive Device Exposure Across Major Vendors
The primary threat, CVE-2024-51978, carries a near-maximum CVSS score of 9.8 and stems from a flaw in the password generation logic of Brother devices. Due to a predictable algorithm that creates default admin passwords from device serial numbers, attackers can easily derive these credentials if the serial number is known. This opens the door to full administrative control of affected printers or scanners — a potentially catastrophic breach in any corporate or institutional environment.
Making matters worse, this flaw isn’t just theoretical. Serial numbers can be extracted using CVE-2024-51977 or even through SNMP and PJL queries. Once an attacker possesses this data, they can perform full takeovers, reconfigure device settings, monitor print traffic, or exploit deeper systems via network access. The scale of this vulnerability is significant: 695 Brother models alone are affected by this authentication bypass.
Rapid7 also disclosed seven other vulnerabilities. One of them, CVE-2024-51981, enables unauthenticated attackers to send arbitrary HTTP requests from the printer — turning it into a proxy for further attacks inside the network. Another serious flaw, CVE-2024-51979, is a stack-based buffer overflow that could allow remote code execution if paired with the password bypass vulnerability.
Other vulnerabilities target server-side request forgery (CVE-2024-51980), cause denial-of-service crashes (CVE-2024-51982 and CVE-2024-51983), or leak credentials for external services like LDAP and FTP (CVE-2024-51984). Together, these vulnerabilities present a layered risk: attackers could move laterally within networks, extract sensitive data, and maintain long-term persistence in compromised environments.
While Brother and its peers have released firmware updates to address seven of the eight flaws, the core authentication issue remains unresolved in existing devices. Brother has acknowledged that this problem can only be fully mitigated by changing the manufacturing process — leaving current users with only partial solutions such as workarounds and stricter password management. The coordinated vulnerability disclosure process, facilitated through JPCERT/CC and Rapid7, began in May 2024 and culminated in a full public advisory on June 25, 2025. Detailed guidance, including indicators of compromise and patch details, is now available through each vendor’s security page.
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Long-Term Impact of Device-Level Vulnerabilities
These types of vulnerabilities are particularly dangerous because printers, scanners, and label makers are often overlooked in cybersecurity strategies. While organizations patch their endpoints and secure cloud systems, peripheral devices tend to operate in the background with default settings — often including default credentials and outdated firmware. This makes them low-hanging fruit for attackers, and these recent findings confirm that the risk is anything but hypothetical.
The authentication bypass (CVE-2024-51978) is especially critical. Its persistence — even after firmware patches — means a large number of legacy devices remain exploitable. Organizations that don’t monitor or update these devices are unknowingly leaving their networks open to exploitation. The fact that the vulnerability relies on static, predictable default credentials is a textbook example of poor security design embedded in hardware supply chains.
From a network security standpoint, the SSRF vulnerabilities (CVE-2024-51980 and CVE-2024-51981) represent a secondary yet highly potent threat. These flaws allow attackers to leverage printers as internal agents to explore or attack other devices within protected environments. This lateral movement capability significantly raises the stakes, especially in sensitive industries like healthcare, education, and finance.
The potential for remote code execution through CVE-2024-51979, when paired with CVE-2024-51978, elevates the risk to critical infrastructure. A printer in a hospital or government office could, in theory, be transformed into a staging ground for deeper cyberattacks — or even become part of a larger botnet. These aren’t isolated bugs; they represent systemic flaws that threaten digital trust in hardware supply chains.
Brother’s response to the authentication flaw, stating that only manufacturing changes can fully fix the issue, is both a red flag and a wake-up call. It illustrates the dangers of relying on hardcoded, non-rotating credentials and legacy authentication protocols. Companies deploying these devices at scale must act immediately — either by implementing segmentation policies, removing unnecessary print services, or replacing older units.
Moreover, these findings speak to a broader industry challenge. Printers and MFPs are often integrated into secure environments but don’t follow the same security lifecycle management as endpoints or servers. Until manufacturers adopt secure-by-design principles from the ground up, and until IT administrators start treating peripheral devices as full-fledged threat surfaces, we will continue to see stories like this unfold.
The coordinated vulnerability disclosure effort — over 13 months in the making — highlights the complexity of cross-vendor response in the hardware world. It also underscores the need for stronger, faster vulnerability patch cycles and more robust supply chain security standards. With IoT and connected office environments growing more prevalent, it’s time to place greater scrutiny on the very tools we often ignore.
🔍 Fact Checker Results:
✅ Vulnerabilities confirmed by Rapid7 and registered with CVE program
✅ Brother and 4 other major vendors confirmed impacted devices
❌ Full remediation for CVE-2024-51978 is not possible through firmware alone
📊 Prediction:
🚨 Expect more attacks targeting printers and peripheral devices in 2025
🔐 Increased enterprise adoption of network segmentation for printers likely
🛠️ Manufacturers may shift toward hardware-rooted authentication mechanisms in future models
References:
Reported By: cyberpress.org
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