Self Googling Leads to Queens College Oops

2005_09_queenscoll.jpgWhat havoc the Internet can wreak: A CUNY law student was Googling herself when she found two files of her law school classmates with loans, with details like their Social Security number, how much their loan was, and their direct deposit bank information. The woman, who was at the school library when making this discovery, told Newsday she screamed, "I was shocked, I was outraged. People have access to our names. Lord knows what they have by now. I'm worried about my safety and my credit. In no way, shape or form should this have happened, and it's been on Google, of all places, for the world to see." CUNY, for its part, claims that it was human error that "placed the file outside a protected firewall" and says they are working with students to keep their information protected, not mention taking the file down, but as many of us know, there are cached files. No word on whether CUNY/Queens College have contacted Google about the problem, but students are upset.

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This issue has been on the table for years:

Dec. 26, 2001
"Meanwhile, some Webmasters are reportedly shocked to discover that Word documents, Excel files, and other material they make available through public Web sites can now be found by searching at Google. There's even the further concern that some of these documents might contain sensitive information, such as credit card numbers or password information.

The reality is that Google hasn't created a security problem with these documents. It has simply exposed them. Any document that is made available on an Internet server (be it Web, FTP, Usenet, etc.) can be found by anyone. People can (and do) even create their own spiders to seek documents of particular types, such as email harvesters that roam the Internet in search of email addresses."

http://www.clickz.com/experts/search/opt/article.php/945001

The question is what happens in the case of a corporate security breach:
http://www.ftusecurity.com/pub/FiTechSummit_final_paper.pdf


Ken
http://www.ftusecurity.com

Moral: Googling yourself isn't shallow, it's recommended.

user-pic

Amazing.
I wonder about the quality of CUNY Information Security Clases??

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