FYI: Many printers print a barely visible code on the documents in yellow color.
That is mainly HP printers. And only a bunch of their models.
I mean, a black&white printer is never going to print yellow dots for example.
It is not “mainly HP printers”:
[1]And yes, the code appears to be only printed in yellow.
[1] Timo Richter, Stephan Escher, Dagmar Schönfeld, and Thorsten Strufe. 2018. Forensic Analysis and Anonymisation of Printed Documents. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM Workshop on Information Hiding and Multimedia Security (IH&MMSec '18). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 127–138. https://doi.org/10.1145/3206004.3206019
In this case, however, the affidavit reveals that Perez-Lugones’s employer could see not only the typical metadata stored by printers, such as file names, file sizes, and time of printing, but it could also view the actual contents of the printed materials — in this case, prosecutors say, the screenshots themselves. As the affidavit points out, “Perez-Lugones’ employer can retrieve records of print activity on classified systems, including copies of printed documents.”
Safe to assume if you’re working with classified documents on government computers in a SCIF you’re being watched. Closely.
Even without the classified environment, it’s not like print queues are encrypted. Depending on your setup you can watch the files going in and just copy and paste them out.
It’s one of those many things people don’t think about. It’s not ever been safe because it wasn’t possible, it’s been safe because it’s generally not worth looking at.
Don’t ever assume anything you do on a work device is private.
Just ask Reality Winner.
Lol this is how the intercept got a source arrested due to poor understanding of technology
Kinda, I’m pretty sure Reality winner was discovered through elimination of who it coulda been.
They sent a copy of it, and noticed it appeared to be a copy of something printed so they did “who coulda printed this” forensics and it was like 6 people.
Back when I worked in IT, I learned that photocopy machines have a HDD and store everything printed and copied.
Anyone else remember 2019 when Matt Gaetz and a bunch of other MAGA fuckwits breached the SCIF in the basement of the House carrying their cell phones and tweeting out selfies from there?
Thought security of a SCIF didn’t matter anymore. But now I guess they claim to actually give a shit. Huh. Maybe that’s just another part of our government they’re selling and they want to restrict access to paying customers now, because they sure didn’t give a fuck in 2019.
It sounds like it was the management software rather than the printer itself. This was about classified docs and there was other evidence too including video surveillance.
