Download music, share bank account info for free on P2P networks

Computerworld - It's not just the Recording Industry Association of America that people need to worry about when downloading music from P2P networks.

A surprisingly high number of consumers sharing music and other files on peer-to-peer systems are inadvertently exposing all sorts of bank account and similar personal information on their computers to criminals lurking on the networks to harvest data. And it's not just users at home who are exposing information about themselves; so are a large number of employees within banks, as well as banks' contractors and suppliers.

That's the conclusion of a study on the dangers of inadvertent data disclosure on file-sharing networks that was conducted by Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business.

The study examined data involving P2P searches and files related to the top 30 U.S. banks over a seven-week period between December 2006 and February 2007. The university used a search engine technology from Tiversa Inc. to gather and analyze all P2P traffic that mentioned those banks by name or mapped to a specific digital footprint that Dartmouth created for each financial institution. Data was gathered from P2P networks such as Gnutella, FastTrack, eDonkey and BitTorrent.

The analysis showed that a large number of searches made on those networks were aimed at uncovering sensitive financial data from individuals, said study author Eric Johnson, a professor of operations management at the school's Center for Digital Strategies. "Our analysis clearly reveals a significant information risk firms and individuals face from P2P file-sharing networks," he said.

When people use popular P2P clients such as Kazaa, Lime Wire, BearShare, Morpheus and FastTrack, they often are sharing far more than just media files, Johnson said. "In many cases they are sharing the contents of their entire hard drive" with others on the file-sharing network, Johnson said.

That's because many of these client tools are designed specifically to quickly search for and share certain types of media files on a user's system. Johnson said, Normally, such P2P clients allow users to download files to and share items from a particular folder. But if proper care is not taken to control the access that these clients have on a system, it is very easy to expose far more data than intended, he said.

There are several ways this can happen, Johnson noted in his research paper. For instance, when a music file is accidentally dropped into a folder containing other data, the contents of the entire folder could end up being shared on a P2P network without a user's knowledge. Many P2P client software tools have confusing interfaces that could result in users sharing folders that they did not intend to. Similarly, some file-sharing apps feature wizards that scan an individual's computer and recommend folders containing media to share. If a sensitive file exists in one of those recommended folders, it could get exposed, Johnson wrote in his research.