Re:-
"You cannot put these on your network for security reasons as they're completely prone to viruses and other attacks."
True...?? Also, you don't know what might already have got in and has infested it's OS, just waiting for another LAN and it's residents to "have a go at".
I speak from experience re that.? In a past job, we had a demo HP VNA to evaluate.? I forget the exact model, but avery nice instrument indeed.? The salesman said that it can print measurement results to a network printer...? So we tried.? (Na?ve that we were back then...)
Within 10 minutes, other people in the office were complaining their PC's were running slow and behaving strange.
Again, I forget exactly what it was, but when investigated, that "Demo" VNA was utterly infested with all the (then) current (and plenty of old) common Windows malware, and two of them had "got out"...
(We had AV of course, but our IT people back then had failed to keep it up to date.? Manual updates, we only had dial-up internet access then.)
When we informed HP (UK sales office) they seemed unconcerned (this was a while ago.)? So, I wonder how many other potential customers got hit, or even contributed to the infestation.
"Trust No One", and NEVER connect anything you don't know the the full history of, to your LAN, unless you can sweep it first and verify it is clean.
Take care.
Dave B.
Ex Technical Manager AR UK Ltd, and before that EMV Ltd.
PS:? It's not "Just" a Windows problem either.? Some commodity Network Attached Storage devices, have intentional functionality to reach out and attempt to scan the other LAN residents by default, for whatever reason!?? Some too, have a default "phone home" facility!? (Wherever "home" might be...)
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Sent from a MicroSoft free zone:
