Your Office Copy Machine Might Digitally Store Thousands of Documents That Get Passed on at Resale

[Are_grits_groceries]

At a warehouse in New Jersey, 6,000 used copy machines sit ready to be sold. CBS News chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian reports almost every one of them holds a secret.

Nearly every digital copier built since 2002 contains a hard drive - like the one on your personal computer - storing an image of every document copied, scanned, or emailed by the machine.

In the process, it's turned an office staple into a digital time-bomb packed with highly-personal or sensitive data.
<snip>
Juntunen picked four machines based on price and the number of pages printed. In less than two hours his selections were packed and loaded onto a truck. The cost? About $300 each.

Until we unpacked and plugged them in, we had no idea where the copiers came from or what we'd find.
<snip>
The results were stunning: from the sex crimes unit there were detailed domestic violence complaints and a list of wanted sex offenders. On a second machine from the Buffalo Police Narcotics Unit we found a list of targets in a major drug raid.

The third machine, from a New York construction company, spit out design plans for a building near Ground Zero in Manhattan; 95 pages of pay stubs with names, addresses and social security numbers; and $40,000 in copied checks.

But it wasn't until hitting "print" on the fourth machine - from Affinity Health Plan, a New York insurance company, that we obtained the most disturbing documents: 300 pages of individual medical records. They included everything from drug prescriptions, to blood test results, to a cancer diagnosis. A potentially serious breach of federal privacy law.
<snip>
All the major manufacturers told us they offer security or encryption packages on their products. One product from Sharp automatically erases an image from the hard drive. It costs $500.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/04/19/eveningnews/main6412439.shtml

I think the security or encryption should be STANDARD and not an option for $500.

[Richard Steele]

1. K&R

[trumad]

2. Only one way to take care of that...

[ejpoeta]

4. LOL! love that movie.

[ProdigalJunkMail]

9. damn it feels good to be a gansta! n/t

[Occulus]

3. It's potentially a single line of code

For $500?

That's a scam.

[NecklyTyler]

5. Be careful about making copies of those spreadsheets

[Delphinus]

6. Thanks for posting this.

I was trying to watch the story, but got called away. We got a digital copier a few years ago and it never occurred to me this might even be an issue when we turn it in.

[Zywiec]

7. Why not just unplug the hard drive for $0? n/t

[FSogol]

8. Nothing a heavy-duty electromagnet can't fix. n/t

[IDemo]

10. If these are regular HDD's with a standard SATA, IDE or USB interface

There are any number of freeware and payware utilities to securely erase the contents, assuming the use is able to access the drive without destroying the copier.

[truth2power]

11. A question...Just so I understand..

Are all copiers nowadays "digital"? In other words, any copier you would use these days (not counting some old dinosaur from 20 years ago) uses digital technology to make the copy.

Just wanting a conceptual framework here. Thanks.

[Javaman]

12. Copy machines only store as many documents as it's memory allows.

I know. I deal with them every single day as a facilities manager.

I have to continually remind our acct dept to clear out the memory.

However, if you are doing large scale scanning, a good copy machine will give you a running total of your current memory level.

once it fills, either it alerts you or it pushes out the old.

So yes, to a degree there is concern, but not as much as the article states, because, like most offices (my company is fairly large), you will have several machines, and as such, will have newer ones coming in a bi-yearly basis. (depends on use). And any good manager or copy company rep will tell you to zero out the mem. It's the moron small companies that don't pay attention to detail that have this problem more often.

If a huge corp finds itself in a situation were there were old important docs still in mem after the machine is gone, that is a firing offense in most situations.