ANALYSIS – In this Wall Street Journal article, the author does a great job of highlighting the hidden risks of P2P applications. With more than 450 Million copies of P2P software deployed, 12 million of which are in use (online) at any given time, the risk of inadvertent sharing of files remains high.
The article focuses on sharing of personal files, such as tax return docs and so on, neglecting to touch on the very real and significant risk of inadvertent sharing of corporate Intellectual Property. The risk of inadvertent corporate file sharing is very high due in part to the fact that (a) many corporate PCs no doubt have P2P installed on them and (b) existing security solutions cannot see P2P because of the built-in security evasion tactics. So the question now becomes, how many corporate breaches like Pfizer and Citigroup have occurred already but have not been detected or publicized?
Click here to view the Wall Street Journal article.