Exploring the Rising Identity Theft Risks from P2P Tools

Cyber-criminals are multiplying quickly and becoming more sophisticated in the ways in which they take advantage of unwitting Internet individual users and companies, a nationally recognized cyber-security specialist told an SD Forum seminar audience June 22. And peer-to-peer networks such as Limewire, Kazaa, Grokster and others aren't helping to quell the increase in crimes committed via the Internet, he said. "It used to be only burglaries from people's homes and businesses," said Howard Schmidt, a former cyber-security adviser to the Bush administration, former chief information security officer at Microsoft and eBay, and now a principal in R&H Security Consulting in Issaquah, Wash.

"Those still happen, of course, but now, it's so much more lucrative to break into people's online information and steal someone's identity, that a lot of bad people around the world are spending an awful lot of time learning to do it." Schmidt, a co-architect of the national cyber-security policy presented to the president's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board in 2003 by himself and then-Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, prefers to call the Internet the "Evernet" and points to careless or ignorant use of P2P applications as a major part of the current identity theft problem.

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