Quote (Ned Smith)

Thousands of Americans may unwittingly be sharing personal medical and financial information stored on their home computers when they use file-sharing software, according to a new study.
"The issue has been bubbling for a couple of years," said lead author Khaled El Eman, a senior scientist at the University of Ottawa's Electronic Health Information Laboratory.

"In the past we knew there was a problem. We just didn't know how big it was. We also wanted to see if anyone was actively searching for this information."

El Eman and his colleagues found evidence of outsiders actively searching for files containing private health and financial information on peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks such as Gnutella, eDonkey and BitTorrent. P2P networks let users connect with the computers of other users on the network and search for and download files.

"Very simple search terms such as 'medical records' or 'credit card' were quite effective in returning sensitive documents," El Eman told TechNewsDaily. Retrieving this information, he added, does not require world-class computer hacking skills.

"It's a total no-brainer," he said.

Quote (AiNedeSpelCzech @ Mar 16 2010 04:00pm)

Yeah, BitTorrent doesn't work that way.

I think eDonkey and Gnutella do, though.