Everything You Should Know About Microsoft Windows Protected Print (WPP)

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Read This About Enabling Windows Protected Print (WPP)

On October 1, 2024, Microsoft launched Windows Protected Print Mode (WPP), a security-enhanced printing platform to prevent future print vulnerabilities and attacks, like PrintNightmare in 2021. This vulnerability allowed attackers access to remotely execute exploitative code through Windows print spoolers.

Microsoft identified that most printing vulnerabilities were caused by older drivers, which are incompatible with many modern security migrations. Their solution is to block the use of third-party drivers and instead default to IPP printing only. This will prevent any installs of IP/TCP printers and direct IP printing in your existing print stack.

Microsoft released WPP on October 1 as part of their Windows 11 version 24H2 security baseline release. WPP is not enabled by default at this time, but the plan is that WPP will be the default configuration by 2027—dates subject to change. 

Why Vasion Print Customers Don’t Need to Enable WPP

Vasion Print customers’ print stack is already secure and protected:

  1. You’ve eliminated your print servers. 
  2. Vasion Print verifies and permits the installation of certified drivers only.
  3. You have full centralized control over all drivers to verify only certified drivers are in use.
  4. You can configure Vasion Print to prevent the installation of drivers from outside our system. 

Because of this, during the height of PrintNightmare, none of our customers were affected by the vulnerability. 

While WPP is not enabled by default at this time, we recommend holding off from enabling Windows Protected Print Mode. We are updating Vasion Print to be compatible with WPP to ensure you have no disruptions if you enable it in the future. 

You’ve Got Questions, We’ve Got Answers

Q: Do I need to enable WPP to ensure my print environment is secure?

A: No. With Vasion Print, you are already secure. By eliminating your print servers, you’ve also eliminated a major attack surface in your print environment. 

Q: How will Windows Protected Print Mode affect my print environment if enabled? 

A: By enabling WPP, you’ll end up being unable to manage the Windows machines that have WPP enabled. You also lose access to many advanced features because WPP doesn’t support them. 

  • Installation Restrictions: It will disable your ability to install any TCP or IP printers and print from those ports, as it only allows for IPP printing. 
  • Driver and Queue Removal: It will automatically remove all existing drivers and print queues from your environment 
  • Reconfiguration Required: It will require you to reconfigure all print queues to an IPP port only. 

Q: How do I know if my printers support WPP?

A: WPP supports any Mopria-certified printers. Luckily, all popular printer manufacturer brands have certified their products with Mopria, so this should not be cause for concern. To find out which of your printers meet this certification, review their certified product list. 

Q: Does Vasion Print support Windows Protected Print Mode? 

A: We are updating Vasion Print to be compatible with WPP mode to ensure no disruptions to your print environment. We will follow up with additional updates as we continue to progress. 

Q: What if I’ve already enabled WPP?

A: You probably noticed that any TCP/IP printer, queue, or third-party driver disappeared from your printer list and direct IP printing stopped working altogether. But no worry, this is reversible. 

First, disable the WPP settings. Then, any previously deployed printers and queues will be restored. However, manually uploaded printers can not be restored and must be added again. If you need assistance, please contact Vasion’s Support team. 

Q: Who should I reach out to if I have additional questions?

A: Please reach out to Vasion’s Support team if you have any questions or concerns.

Three Ways to Make Printing More Reliable

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General office printing requires reliability and availability, so in-office and remote employees can continue their work. A direct IP printing model works well–it relies on a direct connection from the workstation to the printer without using the Internet. Even if an Internet outage occurs, printing continues.

But you’re not only managing general office printing. Your organization integrates many core business processes with electronic record and resource applications that store, manage, and generate documentation. This is especially prevalent in the healthcare industry with electronic health and medical record systems managing all patient information with physicians and nurses needing access to distribute care accurately. 

Your print servers are heavily tied to these vital business processes, intercepting spooled print jobs from the source application and distributing them to the printer or channel they need to go to. 

Consider an output management software.

Output management software either works with your print servers or replaces them entirely. It sits between the source application and your printers to facilitate communication. This software automates, manages, and distributes output from any source application to multiple channels, either physically or digitally. 

Here are three ways we suggest improving the reliability and efficiency of your output processes using output management software: 

1. Confirmed Delivery of Print Jobs

Printers on their own don’t give you all the information you need about the status of your print jobs. Most of the time, it’ll tell you it received the job, then radio silence. If your batch print job of 50 documents made it to page 35 on the first document before stopping, and it’s not a lack of paper or ink, you aren’t sure how to diagnose the issue. Or worse, you’re unaware of any issue until missing invoices, shipping forms, and contract pages grind everything to a halt. 

Output management software often provides bidirectional communication as part of the print job’s journey. It’s extra assurance and confidence that your print jobs and output processes were delivered where they need to go. These updates could also tell you what page the job failed on and what issue occurred, giving you the chance to address the issue immediately without hours of troubleshooting. 

2. Redundant, Low-footprint Infrastructure

Using a Windows, Linux, or Unix print server offers load-balancing and clustering as long as it’s configured and maintained properly, but often operates as a single point of failure if the servers crash from any kind of software or network issue, printing can’t continue, which, of course, is a detrimental interruption to your processes and workflows. 

Output management software doesn’t have to run on a print server. Some use a service client–a low-footprint client that performs similarly to a print server but is much simpler to spin up and maintain redundant instances, eliminating the single points of failure. Print jobs are spooled and received by a service client, load-balanced to the redundant clients, processed, and distributed simultaneously. With significantly less effort and maintenance, your processes can easily scale with your organization’s demands and speed. 

3. Rules-based Automation 

With the advancements in machine learning and robotic process automation in recent years, automation should be introduced in some form for your document processes. Automation can save employees three hours a day, roughly 30 hours a month, eliminating manual touchpoints such as converting individual files to PDFs for printing or reprinting if print jobs fail.

Setting rules that automatically perform specific actions when certain triggers and conditions are met significantly reduces, if not totally eliminates, manual tasking. One popular case is if a print job fails due to an unavailable printer, it automatically redirects to an available backup printer to complete the job successfully. Compounding with the hundreds of documents and outputs processed daily, this simple redirect rule significantly extends your environment’s value and reliability. 


Vasion’s Output Management solution has the reliability you’re looking for. 

Replace your Windows, Linux, or Unix print servers in your environment with a much more reliable and highly available Output Management solution that ensures any output makes it from your source applications where it needs to go, in the format it needs to be in, and when it needs to be there. The solution is backed by a robust feature set that ensures reliability at every stage:

 

If your organization manages multiple critical output processes for the business to function efficiently and successfully and is trying to do it over various disparate systems, or if you’re just looking for more reliability overall, chat with us about your goals, and we’ll discuss where we can help. 

Schedule a demo today.