Data Inadvertently Released Through File-Sharing Program

A person who has formerly worked for ABN Amro Mortgage Group inadvertently released three 'excel' documents containing personal information and about 5,000 Social Security numbers of the company's customers over a 'file-sharing' network.

Tiversa Inc., a company in Pittsburgh that offers services to protect its clients against data leakage, investigated and found that the foundation of ABN data on a Florida PC that bore BearShare software. LimeWire, BearShare and such programs are created to find and distribute movies, songs and similar files using the Gnutella file-sharing networks.

CEO of Tiversa, Robert Boback, said that the file-sharing software is often misconfigured to distribute the documents which their makers never wanted to release publicly. Apgoogle published this on September 22, 2007.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing systems enable a person to directly obtain files from someone else's hard drive instead of the normal way of downloading from Websites. So when a file starts to circulate, there could be copies of it on computers across the world.

According to Michael Hanretta, representative of Citigroup Inc., parent company of ABN, Citi's main priority is to protect customer details. They are completely committed to electronic, procedural, and even for physical safeguards to keep personal information secured. WSJ reported this on September 22, 2007.

Tiversa hasn't done a complete analysis as yet to determine the extent of dissemination of the data worldwide, but had found that the files had moved further from the ex-employee's system. There is no doubt that the files are in the hands of identity thieves and the criminals would not take long to act and seize them, said Boback.

File-sharing programs generally let people share only that much of the content in their hard drive as they want. It seems the breaches occur because users allow others to download files from their personal folders. Scammers are aware of these unhygienic practices.

The leakage of the said documents underline the challenges confronting by companies, which try to control and protect sensitive information when their employees tend to work at home or anywhere outside the office.

Related article: Data Theft Incidents Influence Consumers Adversely

» SPAMfighter News - 10/8/2007