In the age of everything digital, the photocopier is probably the one workplace item you never thought to worry about. It's just making a copy of a document, right? How risky could that be?

Very risky, as it turns out. You might want to press cancel on the copy machine right about now.

The multi-purpose copy machines in your office keep a wealth of copied data on a hard drive that any one can hack.

Security experts say businesses are completely unaware of the potential information security breach when the office photocopier is replaced. They think the copier is just headed for a junkyard but, in most cases, when the machine goes, so does sensitive data that have been stored on the copier's hard drive for years.

Even though high-volume photocopy machines with hard drives have been around for more than five years – most large offices today would have them, the kind that photocopy 35 to 60 pages a minute – people rarely think of them as computers.

Modern, large, office-type photocopiers are computers. The whole system is controlled by a computer, it has a hard disk. It scans images and they are stored on the disc. They are also networked computers and have all the same security issues that a computer does.

Ref: http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/781567--high-tech-copy-machines-a-gold-mine-for-data-thieves