Remember the old photocopier or multi-function printing device that you traded in on your current fancy monster MFP? Ever think about what company and private information may have gone with it?
Most of the big MFP (multi-function printers) produced after 2002 have a hard drive which caches or stores the information you are printing or photocopying. This is to help with print speed, number of copy requests and fault analysis. The scary fact is that these hard drives very seldom get “cleaned” of the information they build up before being traded in or sold.
The information can be extracted by connecting it to computer and loading the documents that are on the drive using data extraction software.
Imagine your office photocopier, what private information do you think resides on that hard drive – not to mention the confidential information.
Watch this video to get a better idea of the issue.
BTW, when selling MFPs, computers or notebooks, make sure you wipe the information off the drives – often a simple deleting or formatting the hard drive will not remove it completely and “undelete” software will restore the information on the device – you need to use software that performs special “low level” formatting that removes the information for good.
One such software company is White Canyon Software, who specialise in data cleaning. For more information on this software here in South Africa you can contact:
Hilton Loewenstein at SeKure-IT
Office: + 27 (0) 11 609 9495
email: hilton@sekureit.co.za
web: www.whitecanyon.com
