OK, your HR and billing records aren’t quite as important as nuclear secrets. But when super-high-security organizations are leaving the door open to industrial spies, it may be a good time to look closer at your own practices.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a US government organization that conducts advanced research in nuclear energy, nanotechnology, materials sciences, and other scientific programs, some of them top secret.

A recent report by the Department of Energy’s Inspector-General found that sensitive information was potentially being leaked from the labs. The problem: Hard disk drives on leased printers and copiers were not being scrubbed. According to a report in the Knoxville News Web site:

“The inspectors reported that ORNL had not cleared or destroyed the hard drives on the copiers — as required by DOE policy — before returning the leased machines to the vendor/supplier or transferring machines to another area for use.”

The recommended solution came in several steps, including:

1. Disabling document servers for a number of copiers with hard drives (the documents would be stored in centralized, secure servers.
2. Requiring copier lease agreements that required the removal of hard rives or their complete erasure.
3. Updating procedures to examine printers or copiers before disposition.

Side note: While doing the investigation, inspectors found that several of the machines had been used extensively for printing out porno downloaded form the Web. They were not, however, able to determine the user who sent the print jobs.

Tags: copier data, hard drives, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Security