A study, done by computer scientists Nathaniel S. Good of HP Labs and Aaron Krekelberg of the University of Minnesota has revealed that a lot KaZaA users are sharing personal files without knowing it.
Some people seem to not only share their music and movies, but also their mailbox, recycle bin, temporarily internetfiles, cookies and even financial information.
The researchers scripted programs to search the Kazaa network for files that store Microsoft Outlook Express e-mail, with the assumption that these would be files that no one would intentionally share on the public network. |
The automatic queries occurred every 90 seconds for 12 hours and revealed 443 instances of unintentional file sharing. In that 12-hour period, 156 Kazaa users were found to have e-mail files open for public review. Sixty-one percent of the searches revealed at least one e-mail file.
In another test, researchers studied 20 distinct cases in which the Outlook mail program had been made public. Of those, 19 allowed access to other categories in the program, such as deleted items and mail sent. Nine users exposed their Web browser's cache and cookies, five exposed word processing programs, and two exposed what appeared to be financial data.
Another experiment sought to determine whether other Kazaa users were trying to exploit this vulnerability by downloading files from other people's computers. The researchers placed dummy personal files with titles such as Credit Card.xls and Inbox.dbs on a server. In a 24-hour period, the credit card file was downloaded our times by four unique visitors, and the inbox file was downloaded four times by two unique visitors.
Well things like this are bound to happen, on systems with millions of users there are always people that don't know what they are doing, if you are using KaZaA it never hurts to check if you're not just that stupid one sharing the wrong files !
Source: News.com
