They say elephants never forget, and it seems neither do photocopiers.
In light of all the attention currently on GDPR and data protection generally, here’s an interesting article from 2010 about the dangers hiding within our photocopiers. For some time now, our digital copiers contain hard drives that store an image of everything it copies, scans or emails. That’s potentially a lot of valuable personal data that can stay on the machine long after you’ve thrown it away.
Digital photocopiers loaded with secrets
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.
The third 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.
But it wasn’t until hitting “print” on the fourth machine – from Affinity Health Plan, a New York insurance company, that we obtained the most disturbing documents: 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.
Something to add to our risk registers, perhaps?
Miscellaneous Details 