
A Gift for the Hackers
Printers, scanners, and other devices now connect straight to the internet, and this report finds them wide open. A young man is shown his own bank letter and PIN code, pulled from an HP e-Print scanner that anyone online could access, and he is stunned it was ever visible at all. The film widens from there: shop owners whose security cameras can be watched and controlled by strangers, and confidential files belonging to companies like Unilever, Orange, and KLM sitting exposed on the open web. Reporters press the manufacturers, HP among them, a company with a 127 billion dollar annual turnover, and get shrugged answers back: fixing default settings is treated as a marketing headache rather than a safety obligation, and one firm dismisses customers who never changed their passwords as "idiots." The report lays out a design flaw sitting inside tens of thousands of connected devices, not a hypothetical one, and asks who is actually responsible for closing it before someone with worse intentions finds it first.