Digital Photocopiers Loaded With Secrets

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thomastvivlarenDOTse April 25, 2010CBS - Digital Photocopiers Loaded With Secrets At a warehouse in New Jersey, 6,000 used copy machines sit ready...
thomastvivlarenDOTse April 25, 2010CBS - Digital Photocopiers Loaded With Secrets

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.

If you're in the identity theft business it seems this would be a pot of gold.

"The type of information we see on these machines with the social security numbers, birth certificates, bank records, income tax forms," John Juntunen said, "that information would be very valuable."
Category: News & Politics
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Uploader Comments (thomastvivlarenDOTse)

  • @thomastvivlarenDOTse i think as IT people we should steal the hard drives and then blackmale our employers :D
  • @ElJoeyJojo Imagine getting hold of copiers from hospitals and the one's sitting at political parties... If for nothing else, democracy would benefit in the latter case considering how crummy politics of today has become. :)
  • @thomastvivlarenDOTse
    It was introduced because including enough RAM to print huge amounts of photos or documents is more expensive than including a Hard Drive. For example, lets say you wanted to print 6 GB's of pictures. To do this, you could do 1 of 3 things:
    1. Spool the images one at a time off the computer, printing as they arrive
    2. Store the images in RAM (requires 6 GB of RAM)
    3. Store images on a Hard Drive
    Of these options, Hard Drive is the cheapest and quickest.
  • @olimar2001 Yes, that is what I reckoned was the reason for having them installed in the first place. Still doesn't explain why the documents are kept lying about though... Integrity and privacy? Who gives a BEEEP when money is to be made...
  • why is the "optional" security software not mandatory and included in the machine's overall price??!! when the decision was made to install hard drives in 2002 - the price went up and lots of hard drives were sold - so the copy companies should have taken "basic responsibility" and installed the erasing software as a user option from day one! they would have sold more drives AND more software (and software updates)... ALSO, why the hell are there hard drives in photo copiers anyway!!
  • @Freredical Exactly. In the clip - if my memory is not failing me - one of the executives interviewed regarding the erasing functionality does it in terms of a feature à la "you can get it for 500 USD". The ignorance of that person is astounding. I say, let's spread the message of this throughout the globe in order to make these copy-machine providers go bankrupt or enable the erase feature by default.

Highest Rated Comments

  • Just how many copies of my butt are out there?
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Most Recent Comments

  • Easy fix for this is when you get rid of the copier. You pull the hard drive and beat it with a sledge hammer. Hard drive platters are damaged and unusable. End of story.
  • wow...I can get a copier for about $300? nice
  • Amazing
  • This is down right scary!
  • Good grief! This is scary!
  • @olimar2001 but there is no reson it should stay there it should be programed to erase it self after say a hour!!!
  • Scary! and preventable! We are insane to ignore this!
  • Why would they even put a hard drive on a copy machine? How stupid. And they charge you extra for a program that deletes the files off the hard drive that shouldn't be there in the first place?
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