Two recent developments highlight the risks that are presented by the use of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file-sharing software on corporate computers, and underscore the importance of having, and enforcing, data security policies in the corporate environment.
P2P file-sharing software is usually used to trade music files, but installing and using it can expose any file on a user's computer to sharing and downloading by third parties, and this is exactly what happened in the latest highly publicized corporate data security breach.
A major pharmaceutical company has recently been sued by its employees in a putative class action relating to a data security breach that was traced to a company laptop. The data security breach occurred when an employee's spouse installed unauthorized P2P file-sharing software on a laptop provided by the company for the employee's use at home. According to the company's letter notification to its affected employees, the names, social security numbers, and, in some
