Worrying Photocopier video

[SpuffMonkey]

Dunno if you're responsible for photocopiers at your school - if you are - you might want to watch this short clip - quite worrying I thought

 

Copy Machines, a Security Risk? - CBS News Video

[skunk]

Passed that information on the Bursar who deals with the photocopiers. Thanks

[adampat84]

Yeah.. some ppl are really stupid, recently changed our leased copiers..

 

formatted Hdd before they went!

 

Americans Gotta Love Em!

[Disease]

I told my Bursar and she said, "it does not apply to us we are a school, what they going to do, sue me?" erm well......yes.

[AngryTechnician]

I worked in a copy shop when I was in sixth form and our Xerox machines had hard disks even back then, so I knew what to expect, but they hit absolute paydirt with the machines they picked. Excellent clip to hit the point home with your school Bursar!

 

I believe many copiers have drives formatted as FAT or FAT32, so even if your supplier wasn't going to erase the disks (or wanted to charge an arm and a leg), you could sneakily pull the disk yourself and erase just the free space, which wouldn't upset any system files stored on the drive (such as software add-ons).

Edited May 10, 2010 by AngryTechnician

[AngryTechnician]

I told my Bursar and she said, "it does not apply to us we are a school, what they going to do, sue me?" erm well......yes.

 

So the DPA doesn't apply to the school? Interesting. Does that mean the school isn't registered as a Data Controller with the ICO, and is therefore holding all pupil and staff records illegally?

[Little-Miss]

Yeah.. some ppl are really stupid, recently changed our leased copiers..

 

formatted Hdd before they went!

 

Wow, ok i admit it, i didnt know!

 

Why do they need a hard drive to store images though!? Have i missed something?

[powdarrmonkey]

formatted Hdd before they went!

 

Unfortunately a plain format does nothing to protect the data on that disk; you need to properly overwrite every sector at least a couple of times to be sure.

[Arthur]

Photocopies have had HDDs for > 10 years so I'm not sure why this is news all of a sudden?

 

There are lots of things you can do to deal with this issue...

 

1) Purchase the photocopier once the lease runs out.

2) Remove the hard drive, run DBAN on it (if it's a standard drive) or degauss it and then put it back in the copier.

3) Scan lots of stuff to fill the drive up. Blank pages maybe?

4) Pay the manufacturer to wipe it for you.

5) Arrange for your engineer to visit and reload the OS. This will sometimes format the HDD.

6) Buy a HDD encryption unit for the copier (if available).

 

Many new copiers have drive encryption as standard now (I think Xeroxes do) or alternatively have a self-wiping feature built-in; so this may not be a big deal.

[Arthur]

Unfortunately a plain format does nothing to protect the data on that disk; you need to properly overwrite every sector at least a couple of times to be sure.

True, but a single pass with DBAN is enough. No one (apart from maybe the government) is going to be able to recover your data.

Edited May 10, 2010 by Arthur

[powdarrmonkey]

A single pass with DBAN is enough. No one (apart from maybe the government) is going to have a remote chance at recovering your data.

 

Once, twice, three times a lady, depends how paranoid you are. The point is, a plain format just wipes the file allocation tables, it does nothing to stop recovery of the data on the disk.

[sidewinder]

Ill be honest, I didnt know either. I thought the hard drive was there for storage if it was being used as network scanner, or if someone chose an option to save a copy, I didnt know it systematically stored them. I assume its to increase speed in some way?

[joe90bass]

Wow, ok i admit it, i didnt know!

 

 

You're not alone! It's something I'd never given a thought to. We have a Konica Minolta engineer in this afternoon so I'll be having a little chat to establish which copiers have a HDD, what's on them and how we format them when they go!

[localzuk]

Didn't realise that they worked in such an inefficient way as to leave documents in memory after the job had finished! It has another issue with it also - what if clever criminals realise that this goldmine of data exists and starts targeting copy machines? It only takes a few minutes to remove a hard disk from a copier.

 

The machines really should be deleting as they go along, or encrypting the data. Seems like a failure of the industry to me!

[mavhc]

Erasing the entire drive might annoy the leasing company of course.

From g4u - Harddisk Image Cloning for PCs :

"Windows "onboard" solution:

Aparently Windows XP comes with a tool to do some harddisk encryption that can also be used to write 0-bytes to the disk. To do so, run the following command: cipher /W:C: for drive C:. You will need to abort (Control+C) after the first round, else it will write random data after filling the disk nicely with 0-bytes."

 

" /W Removes data from available unused disk space on the entire

volume. If this option is chosen, all other options are ignored.

The directory specified can be anywhere in a local volume. If it

is a mount point or points to a directory in another volume, the

data on that volume will be removed."

[powdarrmonkey]

Didn't realise that they worked in such an inefficient way as to leave documents in memory after the job had finished! It has another issue with it also - what if clever criminals realise that this goldmine of data exists and starts targeting copy machines? It only takes a few minutes to remove a hard disk from a copier.

 

Leaving the documents around is faster, helps a lot with debugging, and provides some limited evidence acquirement for purposes in the future. That said, it is mostly plain laziness IMO, and at the very least the leasing companies should be checking that machines are clean before sending them on to somewhere else. On the part of the manufacturers, $500 for a 'wiping and encryption unit' is just profiteering.

 

Erasing the entire drive might annoy the leasing company of course.

From g4u - Harddisk Image Cloning for PCs :

"Windows "onboard" solution:

Aparently Windows XP comes with a tool to do some harddisk encryption that can also be used to write 0-bytes to the disk. To do so, run the following command: cipher /W:C: for drive C:. You will need to abort (Control+C) after the first round, else it will write random data after filling the disk nicely with 0-bytes."

 

" /W Removes data from available unused disk space on the entire

volume. If this option is chosen, all other options are ignored.

The directory specified can be anywhere in a local volume. If it

is a mount point or points to a directory in another volume, the

data on that volume will be removed."

 

Where did Windows come into it? And cipher can only operate on NTFS drives, which photocopiers are unlikely to be using.

[TechMonkey]

Anyone know what the "Forensic software easily found on the web" is? I'm imagining it is just an un-deleter of some sort, but curious.

[Martin]

See the Free data recovery software for memory sticks thread for some examples!

 

mb

[Duane_Dibbley]

It has another issue with it also - what if clever criminals realise that this goldmine of data exists and starts targeting copy machines?

 

Especially now there is a video advertising the fact...

[MatthewL]

Interesting, we are in the process of changing our photocopies, will raise it first thing tomorrow morning, also involve our security team, something I didn't know!

 

Cheers for this.

[Guest theeldergeek]

How your office copier is spying on you in an unbelievable way – it has a hard disk on-board that stores every page copied – The Blogs at HowStuffWorks

 

I know our school has copied student sensitive documents, and obviously a plethora of the usual things concerned with school administration.

 

Now if this issue really is as serious as the report suggests there is potential for, do schools need to be taking appropriate actions?

[SYNACK]

do schools need to be taking appropriate actions?

 

This is why we securely destroy all copiers by letting the staff use them If the service techs can no longer get them going then they are probably pretty safe

[mjs_mjs]

do schools need to be taking appropriate actions?

 

Only the same actions as server hard drives... securely destroyed - a hammer and flame thrower should do the trick. It's what I've done

[FN-GM]

We have a HP 5550 printer with an hard disk in it. I wonder if it will be same?

[maniac]

We have a HP 5550 printer with an hard disk in it. I wonder if it will be same?

 

I was just thinking the same, as we have an HP8550 and a Xerox 4500 printer, both have HDD's in.

 

Might take them out sometime and see what they might be storing.