In every email 256 Solutions sends to one of our IT Services clients we have our names, phone number, and a little cheeky message next to fax. It's 2024. Stop using faxes! I don't say it to be funny, although it does get a laugh from customers and vendors all the time, and let's be honest, anyone who knows me knows I love making jokes. (One of the great joys of working with us is my cunning wit) I say it because it is an important message. It's 2024. STOP USING FAXES. There is no reason we should be using these any more.
We provide VoIP services to many clients, and many of those, especially lawyers and doctors still require we provide them with fax services. Relative to the revenue faxing brings in, the support issues are insane. The number of requests we get each month asking if we can check to see if a fax went through, or to find out why a fax isn't going through are magnitudes of order higher than any questions about the VoIP platform.
The most common reasons faxes are not going through are:
The other end isn't picking up the phone (lookin' at you CRA)
Wrong Number
Busy Tone
It did get through and they lost it
It is actually very rare that we ever detect a technical issue preventing the fax from going through.
This past week the Haldimond Norfolk County Board of Health received a report identifying the lack of a reliable fax system as a threat to public health. In May 2023 the County switched to a new faxing system which lead to significant delays and issues related to the failure of health information being passed around between departments, agencies and health providers.
The new system “impacted the ability of programs to adequately meet the response requirements and appropriately service the community,” - Source
This report highlights problems that our company, and companies like ours have been hammering on about for years. Faxes are dumb. They are stupid. They are dangerous. They are insecure, and yet so many critical services still use them.
Are you buying a house? Getting a mortgage? Waiting for a referral to a specialist for a medical appointment? Those lawyers, banks, and doctors are all using faxes. Faxes are an insecure method of sending informaiton. The current Fax protocol is more than 30 years old. It is insecure and not encrypted during sending. Faxes can be easilly intercepted with a pair of aligator clips and a tape recorder if you really wanted to, yet so many professional organizatons including financial services, legal, and medical insist on continuing to use them, claiming (wrongly) that they are more secure.
Moreover, the mere existance of a fax machine in your network can lead to data breaches due to improper implementation of the fax protocol by manufacturers. Researcheds in 2018 discovered a Faxploit (my new favourite word) that sending malformed faxes to different types of fax machines could lead to a stack overflow error that gave attackers full control over a device on a network simply by sending a fax to it.
"A malicious attacker wants to infiltrate a covert network, let’s say a bank. And the fax number for this bank is public, so he can get that number. On the bank side, if the printer that receives the fax is also connected to the internal network, then all the attacker needs to do is send a malicious fax to this phone number and automatically he will be inside the internal network of this bank. It’s crazily dangerous." Eyal Itkin - Checkpoint Security
All of this is to say that organizations need to adopt proper document transmission processes like online portals, or this new invention called email that actually sends your information in an encrypted format from point to point. The Government needs to take a leadership position here and ban the transmission of confidential information through fax to force organizations to adopt these new technologies in order to keep us all safe and ensure information gets where it needs to get to in a timely fashion.
The findings from the Haldimand Norfolk County Board of Health are just the latest in a long string of incidents that demonstrate why faxing needs to join floppy disks and open SMTP servers on the trash heap of IT history.
What should really happen to fax machines...
If your business in Hamilton, Burlington, Oakville, Niagara or beyond is still using a fax machine in 2024, and you insist that you must continue to do so, but want to do it in a slightly less awful way. Reach out to us today and we'll show you some options. Phone or email us... we don't have a fax machine because it's 2024.
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