Ask any business owner to point at their most sensitive piece of technology and they will point at the server. It sits in a locked room, gets backed up, carries the antivirus and enjoys all the attention.

Now ask when the boardroom printer last received a security update. Watch the room go quiet.

That silence is exactly what attackers are counting on. According to SABRIC data, 38% of breaches recorded in South Africa in 2025 involved compromised peripheral or edge devices: printers, point-of-sale systems, ATMs and IoT sensors. Not the heavily guarded server. The forgotten machines humming away in the corner, running firmware nobody has touched since installation, watched by nobody at all.

The back door, it turns out, is the one nobody remembers is a door.

Why Hackers Love Your Peripherals

Think about what a modern office printer actually is: a computer with its own processor, memory, storage and network connection. It sees a copy of nearly every document that matters, contracts, payslips, financials, client records. Many models store those documents on an internal drive. Yet it almost never gets the protection your laptops enjoy.

The same is true of the boardroom smart TV, the CCTV cameras. Even the biometric access reader at the front door, the card machine at reception and the sensors monitoring your cold room. Each one is a small computer on your network, and each one shares two fatal weaknesses: outdated firmware and limited monitoring.

Firmware is the built-in software these devices run on, and it develops security holes just like Windows does. The difference is that Windows nags you to update, while the printer suffers in silence. Attackers actively scan the internet for devices running old firmware with known holes. Once inside one device, they move sideways through your network towards the data they actually want. Your server may be a fortress, but a fortress means little when the garden shed has a tunnel into the courtyard.

Here is a scenario worth taking seriously. An attacker finds an office multifunction printer reachable through an old, unpatched remote-access feature. From the printer, they quietly watch the network, harvest a set of login credentials from print jobs and traffic, and use those to reach the file server, the fortress, opened with a key collected in the garden. No alarms triggered, because nobody was monitoring the printer in the first place.

South Africa’s Extra Layer of Exposure

Local businesses carry a physical dimension to this risk that global security guides often overlook. South African organisations run devices in genuinely uncontrolled environments: site offices on construction projects, equipment in retail branches, machines in school corridors and halls, sensors and controllers at mining and industrial operations.

A device that sits where the public, or several hundred learners, can physically reach it faces threats a data centre never does. Tampering tools have become cheap, and a physically accessed device can have its firmware extracted or altered, or its stored data simply removed.

Two examples bring this home. On a construction site, the network kit and shared machines in the site office live in a temporary structure with high foot traffic and, frequently, a door that locks optimistically. That equipment syncs with head office daily, which makes it a bridge worth attacking. On a school campus, hundreds of devices, printers in the staff room, display screens in classrooms, access controllers on gates, sit within arm’s reach of a large, curious population all day long. In both cases the devices are legitimate, necessary and almost always the least protected things on the network.

Closing the Back Door

The encouraging news is that this risk yields to discipline rather than to expensive new technology. Four habits close most of the gap.

Know what you own. You cannot protect a device you have forgotten exists. A proper asset inventory covers every connected device, not just computers: printers, cameras, card readers, sensors, screens. Most businesses that run this exercise for the first time discover devices nobody can explain.

Patch everything, automatically. Firmware updates for peripherals must happen on schedule, not on memory. Automated patch management treats the printer with the same seriousness as the server, applying updates during off-peak hours so nobody is interrupted and nothing is skipped.

Separate and monitor. Network segmentation puts peripherals and IoT devices on their own section of the network, so a compromised camera cannot wander over to your financial records. Around-the-clock monitoring then watches for the odd behaviour that betrays a compromised device, like a printer suddenly talking to an address overseas at midnight.

Retire devices properly. A device’s risk does not end when its working life does. Printers and copiers with internal drives leave the building holding your documents unless those drives are securely wiped or destroyed. Under POPIA, client data walking out on a second-hand copier is a breach like any other.

If those four habits sound like a job description, they are. This is exactly what Xcite IT’s Asset Lifecycle Management and patch management services exist to do: track every device from procurement through its working life to secure, compliant decommissioning and data destruction, with 24/7 monitoring across the whole estate, not just the glamorous parts.

The Whole Network Is the Network

Security is only as strong as the device nobody is watching. Your server deserves its fortress, but in 2026, the printer, the camera and the site office deserve guards too, because the statistics say that is where the intruders are getting in.

When did your peripherals last get a security check? Ask Xcite IT for a full device audit, and let us find the forgotten back doors before someone else does.

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Xcite IT | Clearwater Office Park, Boksburg | Proudly Powering the East Rand
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