Accessing Medical Files Over P2P Networks

Gov IT writes with this excerpt from NextGov: "Just days after President Obama signed a law giving billions of dollars to develop electronic health records, a university technology professor submitted a paper showing that he was able to uncover tens of thousands of medical files containing names, addresses and Social Security numbers for patients seeking treatment for conditions ranging from AIDS to mental health problems. ... The basic technology that runs peer-to-peer networks inadvertently exposed the files probably without the computer user's knowledge, Johnson said. A health care worker might have loaded patient files onto a laptop, for example, and taken it home where a son or daughter could have downloaded a peer-to-peer client onto the laptop to share music."

Comments

Wrong issue

[ZouPrime]

The issue here aren't P2P networks. The issue is government employees either loading confidential data on non-approved environments, or unauthorized software being installed on supposedly restricted environments. Both these problems must be addressed with traditional security controls that are completely independent of P2P technologies.

Re:Wrong issue

[evilkasper]

Exactly until they people handling the sensitive or classified material learn how to handle it with the care it needs we will keep seeing things like this. I mean how many times a week do we see something about a lost or stolen laptop or device that contained sensitive information. The issue (as per normal) is the USERS

Re:Wrong issue

[ValentineMSmith]

Neither the story nor the summary mentioned anything about government employees. The private sector is just as capable of screwing up as the government is.