CBS News chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian wins the Accellion Top Sleuth award this week, with his story on Digital Photocopiers Loaded with Secrets. Holey Moley, what were people thinking when they discarded their digital photocopiers? Digital copiers contain hard drives that store images of documents, scanned, copied and emailed from the machine. Extracting this info from discarded photocopiers is not much of a challenge, especially when the disk is not encrypted. Apparently one photocopier even had a sensitive document still under the copier glass. While major manufacturers of digital copiers and scanners offer security and encryption packages, there is mounting evidence that organizations aren’t generally aware of the security risks inherent with these devices.
So why the interest by Accellion in digital copiers and scanners? We’ve had our eye on these little beasties for quite some time as potential sources of data leakage. Today’s digital copiers and scanners provide the ability to scan a document and then email the resulting digital file as an email attachment. Without security controls, digital copiers and scanners pose a serious threat to protection of intellectual property and non-compliance with regulations such as HIPAA. In addition, scanned documents create huge email attachments that wreak havoc on email performance. A couple of years ago we introduced the SMTP Satellite to plug this security hole and improve email performance.
With the Accellion SMTP Satellite organizations can secure and track the transfer of scanned documents and offload delivery from email. And we’ve written earlier on our view that disk and data encryption is always a good idea.
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[...] written before about the security hazards of the multi-function copier, scanner, printer in Digital Time Bombs. After hearing about this latest data breach perhaps we should ditch the FAX machine in the move. [...]