Do you work in a healthcare facility? Thinking about using one of the peer to peer music services at work...don't even go there...and read this article about what happened. As the article states, most folks do not know how to configure these services, thus items that were never meant to be shared get out in the world....and confidential information can be immediately picked up and used by thieves to steal identifies, credit card information, social security numbers, etc. BD
NEW YORK - Three spreadsheets containing more than 5,000 Social Security numbers and other personal details about customers of ABN Amro Mortgage Group were inadvertently leaked over an online file-sharing network by a former employee.
Tiversa Inc., a Pittsburgh company that offers data-leakage protection services, traced the origins of the ABN data to a Florida computer with the BearShare software installed. BearShare, LimeWire and scores of other programs are designed to distribute and find songs, movies and other files over the Gnutella file-sharing network.
Tiversa Chief Executive Robert Boback said file-sharing programs are commonly misconfigured to share documents their owners never intended to make public.
With such peer-to-peer sharing systems, files are obtained directly from another user's hard drive rather than a central hub like traditional Web sites. As a result, once a file begins to circulate, copies can sit on computers all over the world, ready to be grabbed by other users. Boback said more than 1 billion searches are conducted daily over peer-to-peer systems. A good number involve bank names, the word "password" and other terms that appear to be attempts by would-be thieves to dig up other people's sensitive documents, he said.
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