FP Pad » Blog Archive » Photocopiers, Scanners Expose Private Information

Photocopiers, Scanners Expose Private Information

This article was originally posted on April 29, 2010 to advisors4advisors.com, a practice management website for independent financial advisers. For continuously updated news, information, and commentary relevant to financial advisors, sign up today.

Last week, CBS News released an investigative report that revealed how documents with private information were accessed from the hard drives of used photocopiers.

Compromised data included internal documents from the sex crimes division of law enforcement, payroll information, and health and medical records.

Click here to view the five-minute video.

There’s no doubt that wealth management firms across the country are subject to this same risk. Many are just not aware that images of photocopied and scanned documents are stored on a machine’s internal hard drive. If one does know about the document storage, copier manufacturers do not make it easy to permanently delete the stored images (one manufacturer charged an extra $500 for the special feature to enable hard drive deleting!).

The lesson to take away from this report is to always follow a procedure to ensure sensitive information is permanently deleted from office hardware before removing it from your firm. This applies to any imaging hardware, including photocopiers, scanners, and fax machines.

If the stored images are not deleted, your firm could be exposed to significant liability if any client information is subsequently obtained and used for nefarious purposes.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 8th, 2010 at 8:52 am and is filed under Practice Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Helen Says:
June 12th, 2010 at 11:03 am

Bill:

Good post. I missed the CBS show, so thanks for writing about it.

Instead of using a hard drive, copiers could use RAM. When the power is shut off, you would lose (erase) all customer-specific information.

If my company made document copiers, I would take this opportunity to launch a “high security” version. It would cost no more to manufacture, and it could sell at a premium.

Bill Winterberg Says:
June 12th, 2010 at 1:51 pm

@Helen,

Thank you for your comment. The hard drive is built in to the copier for a reason, which typically provides a backup method to retrieve a document previously scanned.

Unfortunately the documents stored on the hard drive are preserved in perpetuity unless manually deleted by the user. Volatile RAM as you recommended would fix the issue of documents staying in memory forever, but it may negate a useful feature of retrieving a document processed by the machine.

Bill

The Persistance of Memory « Science and Money Says:
June 13th, 2010 at 10:53 am

[...] o’ the green shade to Bill Winterberg at FP Pad, who brought the issue to my [...]