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Digital Photocopiers Loaded With Secrets
skids writes 'File this under "no, really?" CBS news catches up with the fact that photocopiers, whether networked or not, tend to have a much longer memory these days. When they eventually get tossed, few companies bother to scrub them. Couple this with the tendency of older employees to consider hard-copy to be "secure," and your most protected secrets may be shipped directly to information resellers — no hacking required. "The day we visited the New Jersey warehouse, two shipping containers packed with used copiers were headed overseas — loaded with secrets on their way to unknown buyers in Argentina and Singapore."'
I always take care to disguise my ass before photocopying it. You can never be too careful these days.
I never would have guessed the copy stayed in memory on the device. When I copy, scan to email or, scan to file it doesn't give me the option to 'scan again without reinserting original'... or does that imply the ones we have don't have this 'feature'?
If they are anything like our photocopiers, the criminals will have to wade through a sea of lolcats and fail posters to get to any actual business information.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Why did they start designing copy machines to have long term storage, and to keep a copy of everything ever copied?
No one is going to sort through millions of pointless memos about employee picnics and birthday party announcements on the off chance that there's something potentially valuable to someone somewhere.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I'm not surprised - there are all sorts of nifty things mere "copiers" do. They can store documents forever, especially "secure" ones that you have to release with a PIN. They provide network services - some include (hackable!) FTP servers.
HPs printers support SNMP, but usually in the most insecure method possible. One of the simpler things you can do (Google it, perhaps not using SNMP) is remotely change the LCD text and blink the status lights. I wrote a script that would make all the HP printers on campus flash an animated ASCII Kirby dance.
Print servers are just that - servers. But, they look like copiers, so they get thrown out with secrets.
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I have pointed this out to my company's computer security guy and his response was, "I don't worry about copiers, that is a human resource issue". I have sent him this story. Maybe that will get him worried. Oh, and I cc'd the CEO.
I hope this caused some synapses to fire.
Having worked in the digital industry up until 2007 I can tell you, that is a laughably inaccurate statement. We had half a dozen industrial-class copiers, all from 2004 or newer. The only one with a 'hard drive' in it was the high end color copier/printer; and we had to specifically add that option. I think it would be accurate to say that nearly all digital copiers might be configured to use a hard drive, though many are external and often separated from the device when it's sold.
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My company recently bought a used copier/scanner/printer, which had supposedly been reconditioned and cleaned. It included a "document server" feature, whereby jobs could be scanned to its internal disk (or print jobs could be stored in the printer for later printing). The salesman who sold it to us had helpfully left scans of his current account statement in the document server, together with some placating letters to other customers. After thinking about what uses we'd actually have, I decided just to turn the document server feature off for everyone. I did leave the deferred-jobs part on (as it's useful when someone is printing on weird stock or printing something confidential) - thus ensuring that anything left on the copier (the company is now defunct, the copier presumably resold) is guaranteed to be juicy.
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Isn't there a spec for deleting data? Seems it would be a good selling feature and cheap to implement a system in the BIOS of all PCs and any device that has a hard drive a way to securely delete all data. This would make it much easier to get rid of old equipment without having to worry about what data is left.
I'm starting to really think that we're making a mistake putting full-fledged computers in everything we build. They allow for an amazing array of features, but it makes fully understanding our machines much more difficult. Security problems like this one are inevitable.
A dumb analog xerox machine is pretty easy to understand, and one that runs on a microcontroller and a few KB of ram (if that) isn't much harder. But who but the most dedicated hacker has any real idea about what is going on inside a modern Xerox. It *might* not have any undocumented "features," but you have no way of knowing. Security has gone from being a matter of applied common sense to involving a large amount of blind trust in these manufacturers.
It's a symptom of a larger issue though. We're rapidly getting away from having a society where a well educated and technically minded person can understand the actual inner workings of the technology they interact with every day. The tradeoff might be worth it, I'm not a luddite. But we should remember that we are entering into a new kind of relationship with our machines,
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
many years ago, in the ages of DOS 4.0 and so forth, we had a hewlett packard laser jet, which we thought pretty slick, that connected with a huge fat parallel port cable. One day, I unplug the printer and hook it up to another PC, which, children, in those far off days was quite an adventure in drivers (this was before you could download drivers off the web.....almost pre historic) While, I send some print jobs, say job1, job2.... to the printer, some of which print and some of which vanish, but, eventually, I get all the printouts I need and hook the laserjet back to its orignal computer. A month or two later, printjob2 popped out of the printer. snce the software for this was not installed on the pc the printer was hooked up tow, the job must have sat in the printer all that time (this is long before any "wireless" was available - it would be 2 or 3 years later that the marvel of 802.11A came along)
Even nicer, I remember a few years ago I needed to scan the work permit in my passport for HR. So I went to the photocopier, did a scan to storage, and from my desktop retrieved from the photocopier storage and emailed. Job done I went to delete my passport from the photocopier storage. No Dice, windows admin rights required, and when I asked a windows admin to delete it for me (and the other 8 confidential documents sitting there with full read access) I got a very blank look.
All the major manufacturers offer options that will delete/overwrite data from the internal hard drive after it has been output. They also offer encryption of all user data on the drives, so that the drive content cannot be read outside of the machine.
As most of the machines in this class now run on Linux, adding that kind of features should be pretty simple.
Yes, both of those are pretty much "open secrets". Here's some details:
color copiers can detect certain unique features of currency, and will refuse to copy a document that has those features.
The currency detection routines are pretty much hardcoded in the image processing ASICs are NOT a part of the copier firmware that gets flashed in a routine firmware upgrade. This means that in general it's not easily updated for new currencies (although can be in some cases where image processing boards are physically replaced). It also means it's incredibly hard to bypass and extraordinarily annoying when it misdetects something.
Most devices will block out ALL further output if a certain number of detections are made in a row. This however is generally just a flag in the nonvolatile RAM which a service technician can then clear from the device's service mode. The legal proceedings for doing so differ by country (in most of Europe for example, there's no specific law, and the techs just do it as a matter of course without any special procedures. In Australia, they're required to contact their head office who will then contact the appropriate government agency before the technician may clear that bit. I don't know about the US though sorry.).
In some poorly designed devices, you can work around the currency detection by bypassing the image processing. This would be done by getting data in to the MFP in the raw raster format that the MFP uses (essentially the format that print/scan/copy jobs are processed as internally before being output on paper or as a scan job) and then getting the MFP to print that directly. The exact method would vary by MFP, but if the MFP has a "box" function where data is stored in user specific folders on the MFP's HDD, then copying the raster data in there would probably do the trick for many device types. I can say from my own work that this will NOT work on all devices though as the devices I work with don't allow raster data to be printed directly from any storage source - all user data on the HDD must be either "image" (PNG, JPG, TIFF, etc) or print data (PCL, PS, PDF, XPS, etc) format, or it will be ignored and deleted during the internal security processing of the firmware (and data coming in from external won't even make it to image processing if it doesn't match a valid type).
color printers put a virtually invisible unique pattern of tiny yellow dots on every sheet they print, so that the sheet can be traced back to its owner.
The yellow dots will match to the manufacturer, model and serial number. It's up to the local laws of the country to determine if the government has the right to request the manufacturer to store and divulge that information. It's also worth noting that in many models (almost every model from every manufacturer, but not ALL) the serial number is electronically entered during the MFP's "run up" (initial factory setup) and so CAN be altered in the case of someone wanting to avoid being tracked simply by clearing the nonvolatile RAM (making it believe it's "factory fresh" again) and then following the service procedures for running the device up. The process is basically impossible to know without the appropriate documentation though, as it's deliberately esoteric and weird (things such as "enter the date, then the serial number, then go back to the date screen, then press OK, otherwise it won't accept the serial number" (note: not a real example)) as a kind of security through obscurity on top of the requisite knowledge to do this sort of thing. A copier technician under normal circumstances doesn't get told about the yellow dots, although we don't really keep it secret from them - just don't specifically tell them. So, I'd say most of them do know about them, but don't know the finer details such as that the electronic serial number is a part of it... If they did know this, then yes, they most certainly COULD take any MFP they know how to service and change the serial nu
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