Photocopier Hard Drive Exposes Tommy Bahamas Restaurant

In just one day the CBS affiliate station KPHO in Phoenix was able to replicate the type of results of our investigation into the documents saved on the hard drives of digital copiers.

According to KPHO reporter Pat McReynolds, they asked local data retrieval specialist Clayton Moline to take a look at four hard drives he pulled from copy machines that were slated for recycling.

"After just 15 to 20 minutes, we got the hard drives from those machines and started to analyze them on site," said Moline.

No surprise that they found something. A lot of somethings. This time the sensitive documents were from a Tommy Bahamas chain restaurant in Scottsdale. They pulled names and Social Security numbers of all their employees and copies of payroll and traveler's checks.

"Our employees are very important to Tommy Bahamas, and we take the protection of their data very seriously," Doug Wood, the president and chief operating officer of Tommy Bahama's told CBS 5. "We have strict policies how all employee data is handled. We take great pains to limit access."

The station notes that the drives in this story were used as an example of how easy the process of pulling data off them can be and that they were on their way to being scrubbed.