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Submitted by: Bill Hickey
NCVA List Master
NRT-0208 P2P Software Compromises US Pharmaceutical Company Employee Data:
An employee of a major US pharmaceutical company installed unauthorized peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing software on a company laptop leading to the exposure of Social Security Numbers and other personal data belonging to about 17,000 current and former employees. A notification sent by the company to affected employees indicated that about 15,700 individuals actually had their personal data accessed and copied by an unknown number of users on the P2P network. Company officials did not indicate how they became aware of the data leak, but said they recovered the laptop and disabled the file sharing software after the breach was uncovered. In addition, because the system was being used outside of the company's own network, no additional data on the company network was subject to compromise, according to the officials.
(ComputerWorld.com 12JUN07)