We’ve covered it before, but the tale of the all-too-vulnerable copier hard drive keeps coming up, this time in a recent CBS News exposé.

Investigative reporters bought four random copiers from a New Jersey used office equipment dealer. When they checked out the hard drives, they found that two of the copiers had been owned by the Buffalo, NY, police department.

And on the disks were a number of shockingly confidential police files, including lists of wanted sex offenders, details of domestic-violence complaints and lists of targets in a drug ring investigation.

The two other copiers also had confidential information, One, from a construction company, had lists of employees and their social security numbers. The second, which had been used by an insurance company, had confidential medical records of its customers.

In every case, the data was unencrypted, and not password-protected. And getting access to the data took only a little expertise and software tools available online.

What’s amazing is that all four randomly selected copy machines had data that would be of interest to prying eyes, information which would leave their former owners open to lawsuits.

The lesson is that, unknown to most people, most copier-multifunctionals in the workplace today come with hard drives, and they store jobs you print or scan, without users being aware of it. When the lease expires and the old copier is traded in, most users do not take any steps to clear off that data, and thus leave themselves open to embarrassment, fraud and legal action.

Watch the video of the CBS report here.

Tags: copiers, hard drive, identity theft, leasing