Photocopiers a security threat

CNN warns us of the potential security threat posed by photocopiers. Not by copied pages, per se, but by the data drives inside photocopiers.

Most photocopiers made in the last 5 years have disk drives – data storage – used to copy documents. Most photocopiers now are all-in-one models: print, scan, fax, and photocopy. Many of the functions that made these actions different have now been streamlined. Some models even have the ability to edit the scanned text using optical character recognition – OCR.

What does this mean for security? Simply that there is another piece of technology able to read and store secured information. Anything from tax returns at the government level to internal memos at the corporate level.

Just like with any data disk, photocopier data disks should be encrypted. Additionally, the material stored should be overwritten when the task is completed.

Sharp Document Solutions Company of America issued a security warning earlier this month to warn of the potential threat. The company conducted a survey which indicated more than half of Americans did not know copiers posed a security risk.

Daniel Katz-Braunschweig, of DataIXL, lists digital copy machines as a data hole corporations should try to protect.

Tags: security threat, photocopier data threat, data threat, data loss, copier security threat