CBS News chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian has reported that nearly every digital copier built since 2002 contains a hard drive - like the one on your personal computer - that has stored an image of every document you copied, scanned, or emailed from that machine.
Keteyian also reported:
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.
Juntunen picked four machines based on price and the number of pages printed. In less than two hours his selections were packed and loaded onto a truck. The cost? About $300 each.
Until we unpacked and plugged them in, we had no idea where the copiers came from or what we'd find.
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.
You can read the full story, by clicking on the link below:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/04/19/eveningnews/main6412439.shtml?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CBSNewsTheEarlyShowLiving+(CBS+News%3A+The+Early+Show%3A+Living)