Copiers: Gold Mines for Identity Theft

Office Copy Machines Store Thousands of Documents on Hard Drives, Are Resold without Being Cleaned

(KOVR) Your doctor, lawyer, or tax preparer could all be unwittingly giving away your very private information. And they're doing it by using copy machines. You may already be a victim and not even know it, reports Tony Lopez of CBS Station KOVR in Sacramento.

The copy machine is an important and seemingly harmless part of our lives. And when it's time to upgrade, the old ones are sometimes sent to e-waste centers for recycling, but usually they wind-up in a wholesale warehouse on the used copier market.

KOVR went to one of two in Sacramento with John Juntunen, an expert on the copy machine business. There were hundreds of machines, shrink wrapped, and ready to shipment.

"You're looking at 15, 20 thousand documents each" Juntunen says - documents that still reside inside. Most copy machines use hard drives to store every document that has been scanned, printed, faxed, or e-mailed.

That electronic file will stay there until someone removes it or new documents push out the oldest ones.

"But this machine here, I can tell it hasn't been cleaned because of the IP-address on it" he says.

Juntunen, and his company Digital Copier Security, specialize in removing the data on those drives; they're hired by companies who know the importance of doing that before getting rid of their copiers.

On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 4:11 PM, David McFarlane <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I heard just recently that vitually every photocopier made since 2002
> contains a hard drive that stores everything ever copied on it, and those
> files then become available to whoever chances upon the copiers once they
> get discarded. Is this something that we need to be concerned about at MSU?
>
> -- dkm
>