from the “another security headache” department

Yes post­ings have been sparse lately — things get­ting busy so alas. Any­way, very short (but rather alarm­ing) note from Wired about copi­ers. Though I knew most copi­ers now used digital tech­no­logy of some sort, I had no idea they actu­ally con­tained full-blown hard drives that store your cop­ies. The exact reason why they need hard drives to copy doc­u­ments, and why the data needs to remain on the drives, is a bit of a mys­tery to me, and some­thing the art­icle doesn’t go into. I’d had always just assumed that the image inform­a­tion was stored some­where tem­por­ar­ily and dis­ap­peared when you fin­ished copy­ing. Appar­ently not. Any­way, here’s a brief excerpt:

most digital copi­ers man­u­fac­tured in the past five years have disk drives — the same kind of data-storage mech­an­ism found in com­puters — to repro­duce doc­u­ments. As a res­ult, the seem­ingly innoc­u­ous machines that are com­monly used to spit out cop­ies of tax returns for mil­lions of Amer­ic­ans can retain the data being scanned.

If the data on the copier’s disk aren’t pro­tec­ted with encryp­tion or an over­write mech­an­ism, and if someone with mali­cious motives gets access to the machine, industry experts say sens­it­ive inform­a­tion from ori­ginal doc­u­ments could get into the wrong hands.

I guess someone, some­where, will be selling add-on kits for copi­ers rel­at­ively shortly…

related:

1. two tales of security
2. the (not so) long arm of the tax authorities
3. XBRL Is Cool
4. arbit­rary elec­tronic search & seizure + cana­dian bor­der = ok
5. so much for the paper­less revolution