Interesting article in Ars Technica today: one of those little technical details that actually gets kind of scary when you think about it. The summary is that most modern photocopiers are scanning to a hard drive, then printing from that. Nothing strange there -- except that the image doesn't necessarily get immediately deleted from the hard drive.
I'd be curious about the technical details (and I suspect that they vary a lot from manufacturer to manufacturer), but taking the report at face value, think about this scenario. It's completely routine for people to do things like make a photocopy of their tax returns just before mailing them out; lots of folks do this at the office. (Well, those of us who still file via paper, anyway.) If I was in the identity-theft business, I'd want to create a cover identity as a copier repairman, and just go around "fixing" lots of office copy machines around April 16th. All that yummy identifying data, nicely bundled up to be stolen...
- That office copier? Don't let somebody walk off with its hard drive.
jducoeur- May 19th, 2010
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hfcougar It wouldn't surprise me if people are already doing that. We get a LOT of calls from bogus copier companies, though most of them are just pushing fake service plans and suspicious, unsolicited toner.
ilaine_dcmrn Not to mention company data. Those are are serious about such things apply security patches to copiers, and remove hard drives before decommissioning copiers, and so forth.
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