eLegal Canton » P2P http://canton.elegal.ca eLegal Canton: technology law blog by a Canadian information technology and intellectual property law lawyer and trade-mark agent dealing with issues including software, copyright, privacy, the Internet, electronic commerce, computers Wed, 08 Feb 2012 20:48:42 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 P2P sharing leaks blueprints on Obama’s Marine One http://canton.elegal.ca/2009/11/04/p2p-sharing-leaks-blueprints-on-obamas-marine-one/ http://canton.elegal.ca/2009/11/04/p2p-sharing-leaks-blueprints-on-obamas-marine-one/#comments Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:56:52 +0000 David Canton http://canton.elegal.ca/?p=1510 That’s the title of my Slaw post for today.  It reads as follows:

A CBS news article says that blueprints of Obama’s helicopter were found on a computer in Tehran. How did it get there?

Seems that a defense contractor legitimately had the documents. An employee saved it on her home PC. That home PC contained, like many do, file sharing software. But that employee did not realize that the file sharing software was configured to share the folder it was put in.

In other words, if anyone anywhere using that file sharing software/network did a search, they could find and download that document.

This danger is not new – but its a good reminder for law firms to be vigilant about where confidential and client documents are stored – even temporarily. Its not unusual for those within law firms to work from home occasionally.

All file sharing software should be set to either not share anything, or to share only files contained in specified folders that one purposely decides to share.

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