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Are Copy Machines a Security Risk?

Recently, I read an article By Armen Keteyian on the CBS News Web Site dated April 19, 2009 which described a serious security problem when office digital copiers are traded in or sold. Since 2002, nearly every digital copier built contains a hard drive which stores a digital image of every document copied, scanned, or emailed by the copy machine.

Each copier with a hard drive is packed with highly-personal or sensitive data, such as client records, social security numbers, and other sensitive information hat represents a pot of gold to someone in the identify theft business.

This past February, CBS News went with John Juntunen, president of Digital Copier Security that has developed software called “INFOSWEEP” that can scrub all the data on hard drives, 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 and the cost for the copiers was about $300 each.

It took Juntunen just 30 minutes to pull the hard drives out of the copiers. Then, using a forensic software program available for free on the Internet, he ran a scan – downloading tens of thousands of documents in less than 12 hours.

One copy machine – from Affinity Health Plan, a New York insurance company, provided 300 pages of individual medical records. They included everything from drug prescriptions, to blood test results, to a cancer diagnosis. A potentially serious breach of federal privacy law.

Another machine from a New York construction company, spit out design plans for a building near Ground Zero in Manhattan; 95 pages of pay stubs with names, addresses and social security numbers; and $40,000 in copied checks.

All the major manufacturers told us they offer security or encryption packages on their products. One product from Sharp automatically erases an image from the hard drive. It costs $500.

But evidence is that many businesses are unwilling to pay for such protection, and that the average American is completely unaware of the dangers posed by digital copiers.