Have you ever made a copy on the office copy machine? You know, the big one you use for large copy jobs.
Did you know that there's an excellent chance that your copier has a hard drive in it, and it stores a copy of every piece of paper that was ever copied on it?
It makes sense when you think about it. Those copiers would have to have some sort of memory in them because multiple people can print to it at the same time.
I had just always assumed that it was flash based memory like computers have, but it turns out the vast majority of them have regular hard drives in them.
What scared me about this is that many of my clients lease their copy machines. So I began to wonder what happened to all that personal data when the copy machine is swapped out for a new one?
It turns out that many times, the old copiers are resold. The terrifying thing is that most of these hard drives are never securely wiped of all that information before they are sold.
Here is a LINK to an article from CBS News about a reporter that bought 4 copiers from a warehouse in New Jersey.
"The type of information we see on these machines with the social security numbers, birth certificates, bank records, income tax forms," John Juntunen, owner of Sacramento based Digital Copier Security said, "that information would be very valuable."
The article is fascinating...and terrifying. Check it out. Then make sure you remove the hard drive from your copier and plug it in to a computer and run Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN) on it before you turn it back in for a new one. DBAN is a program that overwrites a hard drive with ones and zeroes several times in order to keep people from being able to recover information off hard drives. DBAN uses the same technology that the federal government uses to securely wipe the sensitive data from their computers.
If it's good enough for the FBI, it's probably good enough for you as well. Best of all...DBAN is completely free. Just download it, burn it to a CD, boot the computer with the hard drive you want to wipe, and follow the instructions.