A New Way to Steal Your Identity - Copy Machines

So, you have your anti-virus, firewall and anti-spyware installed.  You have a hardware firewall on your router.  You computer is fully updated to prevent zero-day attacks.  You keep your wallet chained to you at all times and never leave your credit cards anywhere.  You shred ALL your important papers and documents and store the ones you can’t shred in a locked safe.  Your identity is safe…right?  Think again.

Just when you thought you knew all the ways thieves steal your information, something pops up that takes us all by surprise.  Copy machines.  That’s right, copy machines are your new threat.  Since around 2002 higher end copy machines have hard drives installed in them.  These hard drives serve many purposes, but one of them is to save an image of everything copied on the machine.

This means when you go to your local copy center, chances are, the machine you used to copy your tax information, driver’s license, birth certificates, financial documents, and confidential business documents has a record of it on it’s hard drive.

What really escalates this problem is when these companies upgrade their machines to new models, they sell the old ones to wholesalers who then distribute them to countries all over the world.

We know the importance of wiping your computer’s hard drive properly before selling or giving it away.  Recovering information is all too easy if it’s not done right.  But it has not been standard practice to wipe copy machine hard drives clean before disposal.

There is no easy way to remove the data permanently from the hard drive. It usually requires physically removing the drive from the machine and then wiping it clean by writing 1′s and 0′s to it over and over again. Some manufacturers of copy machines have stated that they will begin to implement security features on the drives of new machines, like encryption, to help protect the data on them.

If the copy machine is connected to the network (most of them are nowadays), or has a fax line connected to it, it can be at risk.  If someone has physical access to the machine, they can pull the hard drive out, connect it to a computer and copy all of the information.

So if you go and copy sensitive information at work or a local copy center, you might want to consider getting an all-in-one printer for your home that does not have a hard drive.  Until better security measures are put in place, there is no telling who or how many people will have access to your  knows where your information will end up.

To see more about the copy machine problem, here is a clip of a CBS News report: