FTC Warns that Copiers Hold Your Data Hostage
FTC Warns that Copiers Hold Your Data Hostage
Posted 05/18/2010 at 6:34pm
| by Ryan Whitwam
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A word to the wise, that innocuous looking copier in the corner of the office might be out to share your personal data with an unscrupulous lot. The good news is that the FTC has your back. Data security when it comes to digital copiers is a blind spot, even in many IT departments. FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz made it clear in a recent letter that the agency was looking into the problem, and was starting an educational campaign to inform users of the danger.
These machines have hard drives that store the images scanned into them. If not properly secured, anyone can log in and retrieve the documents. The letter was sent to US Representative Markey in the wake of a CBS investigation that found used copiers often have personal data on the hard drives.
Have you made any copies at work you now wish you hadn't? Let us (and the IT department) know if you can access the data on your office copiers.
Image via Flickr user Jpl3k
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SuperiorBeing
May 19, 2010 at 9:50pm
I watched the CBS special, and the funniest part was where they overlayed the video with these graphs that look like important data being calculated. Halfway through that, I realized what it really was: the Ubuntu task manager.
scott tech
May 18, 2010 at 9:04pm
I can indeed,in fact quite easily, access my companies copier data,
and no I am not I.T. nor do I have administrator privelges.
Well, what do you know? I skated by the spam filter..
gamerguy106
May 18, 2010 at 8:50pm
wonder how many buttprints the average copier has on its hard drive
Daemon
May 18, 2010 at 8:21pm
Ah ain't that lovely, perfect fodder for industrial spies huh? Oh and how many own Printer technicians? I guess paper shredders of all sorts are really redundant in this case huh? Ah well...I guess them Ninja guys are getting better and better at blending in and taking things in plain sight.
COMMANDER_COOK
May 18, 2010 at 8:34pm
Paper shredders with hard drives would really raise some eyebrows.
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TheTrevon
May 18, 2010 at 8:12pm
We got a new copier at work recently. It has for some reason 250 Gb on it, just seams like more than anyone would use. Being able to hold all of our frequent documents so that you don't have to rescan every time. But as i was messing with it i noticed that it saves information about all past print jobs, basically the who, what, when stuff though i couldn't find a way to preview the old print job and was wondering if it was actually in their somewhere . . . guess it is.
COMMANDER_COOK
May 18, 2010 at 7:25pm
What the hell are copiers doing with hard disks anyways?
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TheTrevon
May 18, 2010 at 8:19pm
Ours lets you input pages for storage so you don't have to rescan every time or if a print job has 30 different things that it need to know to do the job right (black/color, hole punch(any side), staple, off set, 1 sided/2 sided, etc. etc...). And then there is always a possibility that you might want to do a 100 page job, why though I can't imagine.
COMMANDER_COOK
May 18, 2010 at 8:32pm
RAM shoulda been used from the beginning.
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