Digital Photocopiers Loaded With Secrets

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When is the last time you gave any thought to the hard drive in a digital photocopier? Don't feel bad, most people never even think about it...until they read stories like this about copiers being sold with hard drives packed full of personal information on them.

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.
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This is not new. A local news station recently covered this in the Portland area.

When you sell or return a copier, take the HDD out and erase it using a multi-pass HDD erasing utility.
 
^^ I forgot to add that some copiers are now using encrypted hdds for this very reason. Our newest copier has this feature.
 
Yeah I remember hearing about this a while ago.

Our Toshiba's have internal storage. This is why we set them to save documents to a network share instead of internal.
 
necrosis said:
Yeah I remember hearing about this a while ago.

Our Toshiba's have internal storage. This is why we set them to save documents to a network share instead of internal.
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Same here, both copiers dump to the file server, the internal hard drives were removed.
 
Yeah we had a string of calls on the canon MX series that DOES NOT contain HDDs in them. people panic way to hard about this stuff.
 
The problem is that while we are smart enough to know of this and take precautions, the government and businesses you deal with that you fax things to, or where the employees need to scan/copy data with your personal information do not know of this.

You can take care of your personal data as well as you can, but it's all moot once some retard leaves a laptop with your data on it in the backseat of his car while he stops by the strip club on a business trip.
 
There is some truth and some FUD to this. If you purchase "office" copiers with no service contract, it is definitely an issue on many brands of copiers. If you lease copiers on a service contract, the copier company usually will sign NDA and ensure the inegrity of your data, use encryption, or update firmware to wipe images once they are done printing/sending.
 
How long until they use this as a plot device on CSI?

Serious, what reason could you need to have to store all those copied items? Couldn't volatile ram accomplish the same goal of temporarily holding a copy of the document to be copied?
 
Simple, possibly stupid questions: Why do they need to store every copied document? And why do you need "special software" just to delete it? Cant' the programmers of copy machines make it so the data is not kept after it's not needed?
 
Youn, it all depends on what the copiers are being used for, what companies are using them and what manufacturer the copier is from. The only comments in the article were from a SHARP exec.

In large corporate environments, legal/mortgage firms, hospitals/med data companies, there are usually no issues with information leaking. Unfortunately, it is up to the business or consumer to purchase or lease the correct hardware and software. For multiple copiers and printers, a print/scan server should be implemented. Properly set up copiers will not store data locally unless told to. Copy, scan, and print jobs should delete themselves once finished.
 
I know many of the older generation that swear by paper shredders but never think to erase their electronic data trail.

I don't bother telling them about it because their paranoia is already too high.
 
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