A new study conducted by the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario in Ottawa, Canada showed that doctors are unwittingly sharing information about their patients while they use peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing websites.
The study also showed that computers in hospitals and homes are easily vulnerable to P2P file-sharing attacks, citing various software needed to be installed to the machine. This software is designed to gather all information stored in the computers then automatically share them in file-sharing websites.
“Our study suggests that doctors are actually swapping private information about their patients without their knowledge. Some of the software installed in their homes and offices can make health and financial records of the patients vulnerable to cyberattacks and other fraudulent activities in this file-sharing website,” the study stated.
The study, which was published last Friday in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, said that health-care professionals who are frequent users of P2P file-sharing websites are most commonly and inadvertently releasing official patient records in their computers as they download music files.
“I think that the public, particularly doctors and other health-care professionals should be aware of the situation. They are unwittingly leaking out significant amount of information about the people they are taking care of into P2P networks,” said Khaled El Emam, the lead researcher in the study and professor of electronic health information at the University of Ottawa.
El Emam cited that one of the search software, which is programmed to collect all shareable documents in the computer, can open up important files then send it out to the online public.
“The wizard program is intended to look for media files such as music, videos, and other documents, could potentially be sharing large amount of vital information to the public without you being aware,” El Emam warned the doctors.
The study took almost a year to be completed and aims to analyze all the IP addressed of hundreds of million of computers in the United States and Canada, which are connected to file-sharing websites.
It also showed that at least two percent of computers in the region contained vital health information that is vulnerable to fraud and other criminal activities.