I Have to Wipe an Old Printer, too?

Did you know printers have memory? Large high-volume office copiers have had hard drives for years, but even inexpensive home inkjet printers have a small amount of memory. A recent vulnerability in Canon printers reminds us of this, and that it’s good practice to factory reset a printer before getting rid of it. The main reason is to remove the stored Wi-Fi password if your printer had been connected wirelessly. In this particular instance, certain Canon models require you to reset the networking settings in addition to a factory reset. Thankfully, it’s not trivial to extract an un-wiped password, but even if a hacker were successful they would need to be within a few hundred feet of your home anyway in order to attempt something malicious. So remember this the next time you throw out a printer, but don’t fret if you haven’t done it in the past.