Apparently photocopy machines since 2002 have hard drives that record every document that is copied. Now there are warehouses full of used copiers from banks, insurance companies, hospitals, doctors offices, lawyers offices, police departments, government offices full of documents scanned, printed or faxed by these organizations. They are being sold to people in foreign countries all over the world as we speak. Is your data secure?
I'd like some evidence of this, please.
So what part is news? High speed copiers need lots of memory to do what they do. Not sure why 2002 was cited as some magical date as to when when it started.
Watch Last night's CBS evening news with Katie.
Yeah, now there's an objective, unbiased source...
Oh, Damn. My time machine is in the shop.
willshak wrote the following:
My backup time machine got the info.
I suppose the trick is to do a data security erase, format the drive and reload the firmware. I am surprised this is not simply a function in the setup of the copier. Hard drives are the most likely failure point in anything that uses one. There has to be a fairly simple procedure to replace them. The problem might be in getting the firmware image without buying a drive from the manufacturer.
Why does any copy machine keep images of pages it is done printing? And why thousands of pages? IMHO malfeasance.
Why does one manufacturer charge $500 for a 'feature' that erases the hard disk image after the copy is made? Seems grossly excessive.
The news article said there was a downloadable program for looking at hard disks. Anyone know what it is? One of the Norton Utilities used to do that - long gone I believe.
Another urban myth... They don't make hard drives which could store every image copied by a copier -- just no way to store the data for 2 million copies on one hard drive... If the machines were set up to be able to do this the data would have to be "harvested" frequently to prevent overwriting of the stored images...
If corporations feel that this is a possible risk, then like any other computer device they should remove the hard drive and physically shred it in a machine which is capable of destroying small metal parts prior to abandoning the machines to non-corporate agents...
~~ Evan
Dude, it's in writing and it's on the internet -- what more do you want? ;)
And just think how many images of office workers buns have been stored for posterity.
Of course they do. A typical B/W copier image might only be 40-50kb, that is 100 gig for 2 million pictures. I do agree they probably don't store that many and that work area does get rewritten but that just means the data miner is only getting the most recent thousand images or so. That could still be troubling if a significant number were customer records and internal business documents.
What's fascinating it that nobody knows they have hard drives.They all assume they all had ram memory as in the past that goes away when powered down. I'm sure if they knew, the IS departments would have wiped the drives. Instead, thousands or millions of used copiers are sitting in warehouses that resell them world wide. You would think that would trigger a homeland security alert and a freeze on them. I ain't heard diddly squat about it.
I don't have TV, and rather don't miss it either.
Well, do the calculations on how many images you can store on a terabyte. Admittedly, the drive is probably transitional and somewhat smaller, but with the capabilities being added to networked office machines, they will be ever expanding.
Not to mention, consider the hacking opportunity for a networked copy machine. I doubt the security is anything to write home about... employees could probably easily hack internal corporate copiers with little difficulty and do regular downloads of materials.
I have a device like that I use when disposing of old drives (which I have some unjustifiable habit of holding on to when they retire, then disposing of them when they become seriously obsolete): It's the 2 lb sledge. Does a good job. Sometimes I unscrew the drive covers and just attack the platters, some days I just keep banging until the hammer does it for me.
Do the calculations -- Terabyte drives are REALLY new... The copying machines in question are older and awaiting resale after a company has retired them...
LOL... 90% of all the companies out there that have more than a few dozen employees track EVERYTHING that a user does on their computer at the office... That would include "hacking attempts" and how many files and how much bandwidth a user uses during their time on the network...
A sledge hammer ? Needlessly dangerous... And you would not destroy thousands of hard drives in that manner in any productive time period... They make industrial shredding machines that will shred just about anything put into them, computer drives, documents still inside binders... They are cool to see in action...
~~ Evan
I'm wondering what happened to effect the 2002 date for their inclusion.
Jon
A waste of resources and hardware. There is a public-domain script out there which calls a firmware routine built into most recent IDE/SATA drives, and non-destrutively clears the data table for them. Nobody short of a first-tier forensics company or NSA could recover them. The process is approved for sanitizing up to 'secret' level drives. And it is QUICK, unlike software-based wipe routines. A minute or two per drive.
The 'when in doubt, destroy' reflex is a sin, IMHO.
Most likely the result of bad reporting...
That sounds gosh awful expensive to put that much memory and drive into copiers. After all, there is price competition.
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