Archive for May, 2010

We’re coming up on a very busy season around the office; June, July, and August see more of our small businesses shuffling spaces than the rest of the year combined.  Whether you’re after more space, a more robust street-level presence, or just trying to get away from the old landlord, changes in space almost always require new technology considerations.

One consideration may be the office printer.  Is it getting outdated?  Do you need more features (like color,) higher page-per-minute or better resolution for printing?  We’re coming across more intel every day that businesses who lease or may dispose of owned equipment may need to know.

Many, if not most, printers manufactured in the last decade have hard drives installed in them.  This gave multifunction devices quite an edge in the early 2000s, but the software manufacturers at the time lacked foresight.  Now there are hundreds of thousands of businesses with old multi-function printers with EVERY image that has ever passed through them STILL stashed on their hard drives.  And this problem is raising a whole bunch of new concerns.

Steve Gibson of the Security Now podcast (grc.com) brought this to our attention late last week.  We have several of these printers that have been decomissioned, and were amazed at how simple data recovery is from these devices.  Even CBS News did a demonstration on air last week.

Think about it:

Every document you’ve scanned, copied, faxed, or printed in the last decade, sitting on a drive that you have no control over.  Employee records, medical records, legal documents, confidential financials. There’s no way to delete these documents through the printer itself, AND  the printer is useless without the harddrive. You’re in a Catch-22.  Lawyers, Doctors, Government agencies, and (famously) hospitals aren’t immune.  The data is ready for retrieval.

There are 2 very important points that we’re coming away with here:

Open-source software is saving the day yet again!  We’ve successfully wiped data from several different printer manufacturers using cutting edge tools on our lab servers, making the printers ready for return after lease or resale down the road.  Our use of open source technology to achieve these results is less than half of any price any quotes we’ve heard so far.

Technology is always changing, even suprising those of us who should know better.  Be educated.  In your next printer lease, ask the important questions.  There’s no long-term benefit to using hard-drive based storage rather than a single ram chip, which would be erased on shutdown.  Encryption technologies are being developed for printers that would give only members of your organization access to the drives.  It may be a few months before we see promising change in the MFP arena, but with a bit of education and some foresight, maybe we can all avoid a big headache in a few years.