[HIB]Copiers: How Great Are the Risks?

[newsbot]

Digital copiers pose security risks that companies may not appreciate, especially smaller firms without dedicated information-security staff. But what the greatest threat is, and how high the relative risk levels are, are matters of current debate. The issue has received a lot of attention since April, when the CBS Evening News ran a report on it. CBS declined to say how much traffic its video report has generated on its own Website, but the network also posted the report on YouTube, where it has received almost 1 million views, and the blogosphere has not stopped buzzing about the topic. Most business copiers today have hard drives on which images of copied or scanned pages are stored. Most copiers are leased, and after lease terms expire leasing companies often unload the used machines to wholesale resellers. If a company doesn't wipe the hard drive clean before returning a copier, its contents — which could include sensitive employee or customer information — could be exposed to identity thieves. The same applies to copiers that a company owns and tries to sell.

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