Whoda thunk it? Copiers can also be a risk for information security.

Most business copiers these days use a hard drive – when you make a copy, the image is put on the hard drive, on the copier, then printed out on the pages (copies). The idea here is that you can put in a great big bunch of pages – let’s say 50 in a document feeder – and the copier can quickly scan those pages, give you back your originals, and take its time printing out all 50 pages, or three copies of all 50 pages, etc. While the 50 pages are printing out you can put 25 more in that will wait until the first 50 pages get done – you see where I am going here.

Copiers have used a “buffer” of some kind for years, to allow for just what I am describing above. In the old days (yes, back 5 – 8 years ago, wayyy back then) copiers used RAM chips. These chips were volatile memory, meaning when the originals were printed, or the copier was turned off, the data stored in RAM went away.

To increase capacity copiers went to hard disk drives. Hard drives could store much more memory than regular RAM chips, and now the data didn’t have to be volatile – it could be saved. Better stability for the data (data in this case being the scans of the original documents).

OK, that’s the upshot. Well, it turns out that copiers will hold data on their hard drives pretty much permanently. I have to be honest I was unaware of this, and this is quite big.

Here is a link to a story in February from CBSnews.com detailing how copiers have become the new “Gold Mine” for identity theft. Example: a law office trades their copier in, and the old one still can have thousands of documents scanned onto the copier hard drive in a simple format that anyone can get to.

Imagine that: A law office, with all those documents from lawsuits, divorce and child support information, and so forth. Goodness!

The moral of the story is that the hard drive in a copier needs to be scrubbed just like the hard drive(s) in a computer you are getting rid of. I have some info on this in an older blog post here.

So this one is worth a look – and something to keep in mind when you trade that copier in.

Find the story at CBSnews.com here.