Thursday, April 22, 2010

Have an Office Copier? You Have Trouble!

I saw a few minutes of this the other evening. It will scare the fatoooties out of you.

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.

It's not YOUR copier. It's your doctor's, or banker's--or the one at Kinko's you used to copy whatever.

One quick example:

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.

The results were stunning: from the sex crimes unit there were detailed domestic violence complaints and a list of wanted sex offenders. On a second machine from the Buffalo Police Narcotics Unit we found a list of targets in a major drug raid.

Kudos to CBS News! HT: Ace/Laura

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