It’s all in the copier

Following on from a previous post, I wondered how many people had thought of the lowly photocopier as a source of data and therefore at risk of data-loss? New, well not that new, photocopiers have hard disks to cache information before it’s printed along with network access - so? Now let’s just think what might be on those disks, let’s say the photocopier is at quarter or year end. and its on the executive floor or even just a sales floor. While many things are sent by email, more often than not board papers, sales numbers and last minute deals are all printed out for use in meetings or FAX’ing to customers. So, all this information will therefore be on the hard disk - now. what if a person wearing the appropriate uniform came in to ‘fix’ the system or perhaps just to service it and swapped out the hard disks. It sounds a little far fetched, but it has happened - and enough for copier (and printer) manufacturers to begin offering encryption on the hard disks in their systems.When looking for sources of data loss, it pays to think out-of-the-box - the data might be in more places than you first imagined.

February 27, 2008 | Filed Under IT equipment, data-loss, security 

comments

Leave a Reply