A Peculiar Blog

I was going through some of my long neglected email this morning and among a collection of prototype 37c reviews, allegedly “breaking” news items about the antics of this or that sports figure and at least three people writing to say that they have discovered “the” secret to making money online and were willing to share it with me for anywhere from $47 to $597 there was a news item from CBS news that I very nearly overlooked.

It’s about the almost totally overlooked or ignored security risk of using copiers.  Not the risk that somebody in your office will use the copier to make copies of important proprietary company information.  Rather the risk that the contents of the copiers hard drive will fall into the wrong hands.

That’s right.  Copiers these days have hard drives just like computers do and every single copy that is made on that machine is stored as an image on that hard drive.  This may sound unrealistic but when you remember that the cost of disk space is dropping at an incredible rate these days it’s not unrealistic at all.

The problem, according to the article, is the fact that almost nobody even knows about the problem and of those that are aware of it, very few ever bother to take action to do something about it.  Read the article, you’ll find it and the accompanying video segment a real wake up call!

I strongly suggest that if you’re replacing a copier that it’s a VERY good idea to take some time and open up the old one, remove it’s hard drive and then connect it to a computer and use something like Eraser to thoroughly wipe the contents of it before allowing that copier to be sold, given away or even just thrown out.

[tags]privacy, copier, hard drive, digital copies, privacy leak, security[/tags]