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Indictment Highlights File-Sharing Risks

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the careful-what-you-share dept.

Bomarc writes "Via the KOMO-TV website, an article from the Associated Press about how Gregory Thomas Kopiloff used Limewire, Soulseek and other peer-to-peer file-sharing programs to troll other computers for financial information, which he used to open credit cards for an online shopping spree, according to a four-count indictment unsealed in US District Court on Thursday. The news article isn't big on details, but it does outline the risks with peer-to-peer file-sharing programs."

3 of 86 comments (clear)

  1. Search for 'Resume' by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    An old Kazaa trick I used to entertain myself back in the day. Mainly to see what NOT to do on a resume, but you could get pretty adequate information from them. Some people included birthday, SSN, other stuff that should never be on a resume.

    Fun times.

    1. Re:Search for 'Resume' by langelgjm · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Yeah, we used to do this on a college file-sharing network. We'd search for files that were on the root of the drive, like "io.sys", and find all the people who were sharing their entire hard drives. Then we'd root through their documents and find compromising pictures of them and make fun of them in the main chat, usually followed by the advice "STOP SHARING YOUR ENTIRE DRIVE."

      There was also a correspondence between assigned IPs and the different dormitories, which was apparently easy enough to figure out, with the result that the ops often freaked out new users by telling them where they lived.

      --
      "Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
    2. Re:Search for 'Resume' by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I forgot about this one. We had a student at my first university that put up a search engine for the network. Twice a day it'd ping all the computers on campus (1600 students, maybe 800 living on campus) and then store the results in a database.

      It was just a 'dumb' spider so it went everywhere it could.

      jpg would turn up 'private' party pictures. doc's would turn up Resume's and homework solutions... those were the days.

      And we did the same thing you did. Anyone sharing everything would get a nice desktop text file "README". /Anyone remember searchtree?