Scottish inventor Alexander Bain patented a design in 1843 for an electric telegraph able to transmit images over wires. Meanwhile, the first patent for the telephone was obtained by Alexander Bell (another Scotsman, incidentally, who emigrated to the US), and not until 1876.<\/p>\n
Faxes also entered commercial use much earlier than phones. In the 1860s, on the Paris-Marseilles and Paris-Lyon lines, Italian engineer Giovanni Caselli set up his \u201cpantelegraph\u201d \u2014 a real, albeit rudimentary facsimile machine. At roughly the same time, an experimental facsimile line was laid in Russia linking the imperial palaces in St. Petersburg and Moscow. The world\u2019s first commercial telephone lines started humming a decade later, in 1877.<\/p>\n
Faxes may have gone out of fashion years ago, but they never went totally out of use: Go to the website of almost any large company or government agency, click the \u201cContact us\u201d link, and you\u2019re sure to see a fax number. That means somewhere in the bowels of the organization is an office with a fully functioning fax machine \u2014 even if it\u2019s rather dusty. There might even be more than one.<\/p>\n
Skeptics who refuse to countenance that fax machines are still in operation should simply do an online search for working fax numbers. This query yields more than 400 million<\/a> results in English, a whisker under 50 million<\/a> in Russian, and an astonishing 300 million<\/a>, yes, in Japanese.<\/p>\n Turns out that in Japan, having a fax is still routine<\/a> not only for corporate organizations, but also for individuals. The estimates vary, but it seems that faxes are still<\/a> used<\/a> in 40% to 50% of Japanese households.<\/p>\n The basic document that defines faxing protocol goes by the name of ITU-T Recommendation T.30<\/a>. Created in 1985, it governs the activity of manufacturers to this day. More than a dozen new versions and amendments have been published since, but even the most recent date back to 2005.<\/p>\n Just in case you\u2019ve forgotten, in 2005 the most modern operating system was Windows XP, the snazziest browser was Internet Explorer 7, and the world\u2019s most popular mobile phone was the Nokia 1110.<\/p>\n Not many people know (or care), but it\u2019s possible to send color images by fax, not just grainy black and white. This feature found its way into the 1996 version of the abovementioned T.30 standard. What\u2019s more, black-and-white faxes are transmitted in TIFF format, whereas color faxes use JPEG.<\/p>\n Of course, not all fax machines produced post-1996 can transmit and print in full color \u2014 that depends on the specific model. But many of the devices in use today can.<\/p>\n If truth be told, most organizations probably ditched their dedicated fax machines long ago in favor of more modern contraptions known as multifunctional printers (MFPs) or all-in-one (AIO) units that combine a printer, scanner, copier, and the dear old fax machine.<\/p>\n These devices are basically computers. First, they are connected to a phone line for receiving and sending faxes. And second, they are often hooked up to a home or corporate network to provide easy printing and scanning.<\/p>\n MFPs are primarily printers, and they operate along similar lines. Any commands given to the printer by the computer are processed as print jobs. This also applies to firmware updates \u2014 they too are sent as print jobs. Of course, this is not immediately obvious to the user, who just downloads a program that updates the firmware from the manufacturer\u2019s website. But under the hood, that\u2019s essentially what\u2019s going on; the firmware is kind of \u201cprinted out.\u201d<\/p>\n At DEF CON 26, researchers Yaniv Balmas and Eyal Itkin presented a report playfully entitled \u201cWhat the Fax?<\/a>,\u201d in which they demonstrated how to hack a fax machine through a telephone connection. The guinea pig in the study was a cheap MFP made by HP.<\/p>\n Although it took a while to study the MFP firmware, Balmas and Itkin eventually found a vulnerability in a device operating system module responsible for processing JPEG files received by fax. Using this vulnerability, they were able to gain full control over the MFP by means of an incoming fax. To demonstrate the potential consequences, the researchers used the EternalBlue exploit (well known after the WannaCry<\/a> and NotPetya<\/a> outbreaks) to infect a computer connected to the same network as the device.<\/p>\n4. The fax transmission standard was last updated in 2005<\/h3>\n
5. Fax machines can transmit color images<\/h3>\n
6. The modern fax machine is more than just a fax machine<\/h3>\n
7. To update the MFP firmware, you need to\u2026print it<\/h3>\n
8. Fax machines can be used to hack a corporate network<\/h3>\n