Fergie's Tech Blog

Stolen Data Lives On - In Google Searches

Deborah Gage writes in The San Francisco Chronicle:

A Colorado woman logged on to her computer in April, voted on a CNN poll, shopped for airline tickets and calculated payments for a $25,000 car loan from Wells Fargo.

She didn't suspect that a malicious software program was recording every keystroke - frequent-flier numbers and passwords, her home address and phone number, an online conversation she was having with some friends.

But it was, and months after authorities were alerted to the breach and disabled the server in Malaysia where her data were being stored, the information was still available online - in a Google search.

The woman, who asked not to be named, was shocked to receive a call from a Chronicle reporter asking if she recognized the personal information, which had been crawled and stored by Google as Google caches all unprotected data it finds on the Web.

posted by Fergie @ 7/07/2008 06:48:00 PM