*ALERT*...CBS Report: Copy Machines Retain Copies On Their Hard Drives !

[KoKo]

Very Scary...worth a watch of the CBS Reports!

(Commercial Free link, here)

http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/cbs-report-copy-machines-retain-copie


So if you're copying your resume on the office printer, you might want to rethink that:

<http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/04/19/eveningnews/main6412439.shtml>

(CBS)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."

*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.

<...> We didn't even have to wait for the first one to warm up. One
of the copiers had documents still on the copier glass, from the
Buffalo, N.Y., Police Sex Crimes Division.

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.*

[Orrex]

1. How many photocopied asses do you suppose are on hard drives across the country?

The mind boggles.

[Hawkeye-X]

4. came here for that.

Leaving satisified. Thanks, Orrex.

Hawkeye-X

[DemoTex]

24. My G/F used to send me "pressed ham" photo-copies when I was in 'Nam.

I wonder if that copier is still around. If so, I'd like to buy it!

:rofl:

[Blackhatjack]

2. So not only do copiers print an invisible code on each sheet, they save copies of every doc....

Sounds like someone at the NSA/CIA/FBI got carried away in conducting surveillance without a warrant.

Supposedly every page copied today has an code printed on the sheet that is so small that it is invisible to the naked eye, but that the copied page can be traced back to the particular copy machine that made it.

[ima_sinnic]

9. I have seen it using a printer's loupe on copies from my home printer

it is tiny yellow dots, and they must be in some kind of pattern.
I saw them on copies from my previous HP printer but have not checked copies from the HP4580 I bought recently but have to assume they're there, too.

[gmoney]

29. where are they?

now I'm getting paranoiderer...

[TampaAnimus2010]

3. I have personal experience with this issue...

I work in IT security and we've been chasing this monster since we heard about it a few weeks ago. Luckily all Xerox systems made from the last 2 years forward have this fixed. Older models have firmware upgrades that can fix it. Now, how many companies actually upgrade the firmware in their copier/printers? Who knows.

[kenny blankenship]

5. The copier has long been an espionage tool.

In the early 1960s when Xerox machines were new and needed frequent cleaning and maintenance, the CIA had the Xerox repairman for the Soviet embassy install tiny cameras in their Xerox 914s. Not knowing what should be in a Xerox machine and what shouldn't be, the Soviet embassy staff including KGB officers naively used the machine to make copies of everything. And every couple of weeks the Xerox repairman would take away small canisters of film with the USSR's most closely guarded secrets in them.

Many years later a US chemical company was caught doing the same thing to a competitor's copiers. The forehead slapping in the Kremlin must have been thunderous.

Any US designed computer- network hardware or operating system must be considered to be backdoored for easy access by the NSA and CIA by default. Most likely there will be more than one backdoor - some that the foreign intelligence services are meant to find (bc they know they must be there) and others they aren't supposed to find.

[ddeclue]

30. that's nothing.. most of them are networked these days so you don't really have to even buy one used

just have to be able to hack someone's network to see what is on their copier.

:hide:

[Rosa Luxemburg]

6. you can catch criminals this way too

[WinkyDink]

21. Always the rationale, isn't it?

[FiveGoodMen]

23. If you've done nothing wrong, there's no need for privacy

God, that sounds familiar...

[Rosa Luxemburg]

28. unless someone tries to set you up?

[fishwax]

7. egads

:wow:

[hlthe2b]

8. Buy a scanner and a small laser printer--very economical now...

You can avoid Kinkos and similar high risk alternatives-- using them only for multiple copies of non-sensitive materials...

[woo me with science]

10. Ugh.

More sinking feeling. Every day a new erosion of privacy.

[malaise]

11. What about the voting machines? n/t

[hobbit709]

12. Don't get a copier with a hard drive.

[WinkyDink]

22. Whom are you addressing, the banks? Corporations?

[Egnever]

13. I dont think this is true

Nearly every one has a memory but they are relatively small and not easily removed. They can however store a lot of documents. I dont believe they have actual hard drives. I could be wrong but after looking at the specs on a few machines because of this article I have yet to find one that has a hard drive.

Thats not to say these things dont store documents they do but there is not an unlimited amount of memory to store "everything they ever copied"

[MadHound]

14. Probably true.

A decent size machine could have a few thousand gigs on board. Image files for these purposes are small, thus there's a lot of storage capability. Then all it takes is uplinking to a larger computer, you don't have to move the drive itself out.

Copiers have become rather sophisticated over the years, having as much computing power as comparable PC's of their day. I worked in a print shop over a decade ago and saw the capabilities as the tech started to enter the digital stage. You could already hook something like a Cannon 6500 or Xerox 5100 to the net and print from a remote computer. All the copier process is doing is imaging, and once that image is digital it can be stored anywhere.

More likely than not, at least in some organizations or businesses, there are already large stores of images that were taken from copiers, possibly going back a decade or more.

The joys of the digital age, the decay of privacy. Besides, you have nothing to hide anyway, now do you?

[Egnever]

15. A few thousand gigs?

Sorry but no. Hard drives the largest hard drives on the market right now are only 2 thousand gigs max and again these machines dont have hard drives they have memory or ram. I dont think the people who did this article know what they are talking about,

[MadHound]

16. They had hard drives in them a decade ago,

I know, I saw, I worked with these puppies.

And like I said earlier, hook them into the LAN, another technological innovation over a decade old, and the images can be stored anywhere on that network.

[Egnever]

18. I stand corrected

[IDemo]

17. Small hard drives are pretty standard on high-end printers

Nothing you'd want to waste time or money on for the PC, but they are useful on corporate LANs.

http://www.computerdrives.com/catalog/index.php?cPath=22

[slampoet]

19. You are thinking of the old tech of copy machines circa 1990. Nowadays they have a lot of storage.

This isn't just little amounts of Ram, like your home printer. This is real hard drive storage just like your home system and the data stays once the power is gone and if the firmware was badly written it may be totally unsecured and not erasable from the copier interface instead requiring removing the drive and blanking it from a whole other computer.

This is also a Building full of data in there.........


1 page = less than 1 megabyte of data in a B/W scan copy

The smallest new size of hard drive from 2002 was 80 GIGs and there are more than 80,000 megabytes in 80 gigabytes

So that means that these copiers have the ability to save 80,000 pages of text and that is just a low estimate for old machines.

Just to give you an idea of 80,000 pages. Consider this, 100,000 pages is considered to be about the size of a small City Library Branch.

Now consider that no one really OWNS copiers anymore. Copiers are rented out and rotated often from wholesale services like IKON. A Machine that is in your office today could be rotated out to your competition's office in three months.

BTW - I can tell you that a rough average office machine does 5000 copies a month. So you could have years of paper trails backed up on machines, in theory.

Now think of the 4th amendment rights issues associated with this information on this hard drive that you only rent from a wholesaler who has an exclusive service contract when the FBI knocks.

[DatManFromNawlins]

26. Your assumption is wrong

We just replaced an old copier with a new one. We removed the hard drive from the old machine and destroyed it.

[KoKo]

20. ...for those who missed it.

[Divine Discontent]

25. yep. so many people don't realize this... good post.

[NorthCarolina]

27. Imagine how many pics of peoples Butts must be stored on those copy machines. n/t