The Security Threat
Millions of people around the world, who swap music, movies and other digital content on computers over the Internet, inadvertently put their personal, company or institution’s data at risk. Users of popular file-sharing services such as LimeWire inadvertently share files and other information on their PC’s, laptops or network through a so-called peer-to-peer network.
Many high-profile network security breaches via these networks have made personal financial information on thousands of people, available over the internet. A large percentage of IT Directors and Administrators have a false sense of security, believing that existing firewalls and other measures protect their networks however identity-theft experts say the problem is real and growing.
The risk from file-sharing “will get worse before it gets better,” says Don McGillen, executive director of Carnegie Mellon CyLab, an initiative of the university in Pittsburgh that develops computer-security technology.
The number of incidents of a security breach into private and public networks is wide spread and has impacted some of the most secure networks in the nation.
Citigroup had a data breach where the names and Social Security numbers from 5,200 customer accounts were inadvertently leaked by an employee using LimeWire. Pfizer shared the names and Social Security numbers of 17,000 current and former employees were leaked after the spouse of an employee downloaded file-sharing software onto a company laptop.
Identity-theft experts, federal regulators and the file-sharing services themselves acknowledge the growing risk. The House Oversight and Government Reform committee sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission urging it to expand its focus on file-sharing.
Tiversa, Inc., a company based in Cranberry Township, Pennsylvania is offering a product to monitor the sharing of files online however it does not offer any product or service to prevent such applications from exposing networks to this serious threat. At any given time, as many as 12 million people world-wide are logged on to P2P networks, according to Tiversa, and 450 million copies of P2P software have been downloaded.
LimeWire and other file-sharing services “say” they are seeking to limit how files are shared, however, this is the very foundation of how they operate these applications and identity-theft experts say the steps are inadequate or confusing.
In simple terms, file-sharing allows users to swap personal files on their hard drives — from music files and videos to documents and PDFs — via a peer-to-peer network (often called a P2P). Users download an application (typically free) from any number of services that operate on these networks, with names like BearShare, Kazaa, Morpheus and LimeWire.
The application establishes a direct connection and access one of several P2P networks. Once connected to the network, users search for and download copies of files that other users have on their hard drives, even if those users of different applications that connect to the same network. This makes P2P unique because at any given time there could be millions of people connected to these networks, all across the world.
P2P networks are often disparaged by critics for enabling users to illegally download copyright material. P2Ps first came to national attention in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the original version of Napster battled litigation from the music industry. The possibility of identity theft wasn’t really on the radar then. But now, the newer applications such as LimeWire — which unlike Napster don’t house a database of files on their own servers, in an attempt to avoid copyright litigation — have led to a surge in popularity.