Your Office Copy Machine Might Digitally Store Thousands of Documents That Get Passed on at Resale
(CBS) 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.”
John Juntunen’s company Digital Copier Security – developed software that can scrub all the data on photocopier hard drives. (CBS)
Juntunen’s Sacramento-based company Digital Copier Security developed software called “INFOSWEEP” that can scrub all the data on hard drives. He’s been trying to warn people about the potential risk – with no luck.
“Nobody wants to step up and say, ‘we see the problem, and we need to solve it,'” Juntunen said.
This past February, CBS News went with Juntunen to a warehouse in New Jersey, one of 25 across the country, to see how hard it would be to buy a used copier loaded with documents. It turns out … it’s pretty easy.
Juntunen picked four machines based on price and the number of pages printed. In less than two hours his selections were packed and loaded onto a truck. The cost? About $300 each.
Until we unpacked and plugged them in, we had no idea where the copiers came from or what we’d find.
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