Hi, my name is Paul with Framing the World TV. The article reads, be careful what you
photocopy.
A warehouse in New Jersey filled with 6,000 used copy machines, ready to be sold. And
almost every one of them holds a secret.
That's it?
That's the hard drive.
Every digital copier built since 2002 contains one of these, a hard drive. Like the one on
your personal computer, it stores an image of every document scanned, copied or emailed
by the machine.
In the process, turning an office staple into a digital time bomb, packed with highly personal
or sensitive data.
We would find as many as 20,000 documents on it.
If you're in the identity theft business, this has got to be some kind of pot of gold.
Social security numbers, birth certificates, bank records, income tax forms, that information
I would think would be very valuable.
John Juntunen's Sacramento-based company, Digital Copier Security, developed software
that can scrub all the data on hard drives. He's been trying to warn people about the
potential risk with no luck.
Nobody wants to step up and say, we see the problem, we need to solve it.
So we went with Juntunen to this warehouse, one of 25 across the country, to see how hard
it would be to buy a used copier, loaded with documents. Turns out, it's pretty easy.
I get equipment in all day, every single day.
Juntunen picked four machines based on price and the number of pages printed. In less than
two hours his selections were packed and loaded onto a truck. The cost? About $300 each.
Until we unpacked and plugged them in, we had no idea where the copiers came from or
what we'd find. We didn't even have to wait for the first one to warm up.
We've got some documents here on the glass. This machine came from the city of Buffalo,
New York. Police, Sex Crimes Division. This machine has 249,000 copies on it, total copies.
Prints has 42,000 prints on it. It's also used in the fax machine.
It took Juntunen about 30 minutes to pull the hard drives out of the copiers. Then using
a forensic software program available free on the internet, he ran a scan, downloading
tens of thousands of documents in less than 12 hours. The results were stunning. From
the sex crimes unit, detailed domestic violence complaints and a list of wanted sex offenders.
On a second machine from the Buffalo PD narcotics unit, we found a list of targets in a major
drug raid. The third machine from a New York construction company spit out design plans
for a building near ground zero in Manhattan. 95 pages of pay stubs with names, addresses
and social security numbers and $40,000 in copy checks.
But it wasn't until we hit print on the fourth machine from a New York insurance company
that we obtained the most disturbing documents. 300 pages of individual medical records,
everything from drug prescriptions to blood test results to a cancer diagnosis, a potentially
serious breach of federal privacy law. We're talking about potentially ruining somebody's
life where they could suffer serious social repercussions.
Ira Winkler is a former analyst for the National Security Agency and a leading expert on digital security.
You have to take some basic responsibility and know that these copiers are actually computers
that need to be cleaned up.
The Buffalo PD and the New York construction company declined comment on our story. As
for affinity, they issued this statement that said in part, we are taking the necessary
steps to ensure that none of our customers' personal information remains on other previously
leased copiers and that no personal information will be released inadvertently in the future.
Ed McLaughlin is president of Sharp Imaging, the digital copier company.
Has the industry failed in your mind to inform the general public of the potential risks
involved with a copier?
I think yes. In general, the industry has failed.
In 2008, Sharp commissioned a survey on copier security that found 60% of Americans don't
know that copiers store images on a hard drive. Sharp tried to warn consumers about
the threat, but...
It's falling on deaf ears or people don't feel it's that important or will take care
of it later.
All the major manufacturers told us they offer security or encryption packages on their
products. McLaughlin showed us this one from Sharp that automatically erases an image from
the hard drive.
How much does that component, that option cost on a machine like this?
Five hundred dollars.
But evidence keeps piling up in warehouses that many businesses are unwilling to pay
for such protection and that the average American is completely unaware of the dangers posed
by digital copiers.
The day we visited that New Jersey warehouse, two shipping containers packed with used copiers
were headed overseas, loaded with secrets, on their way to unknown buyers in Argentina
and Singapore.
Armin Kattai in CBS News, New York.
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