Mortgage Data Leaked through BearShare

Major lesson for those who use peer to peer file sharing is to make sure that they are not sharing private files they don't want out there on the internet, this recent article, Mortgage Data Leaked Over File Network points out what can easily happen if you are not careful:

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.