Michelle Malkin started the P2P mining meme a few days ago, pointing out how many tax returns were available on P2P networks with a simple search of “1040″ or the like. Tax Guru, Tax Prof, Roth & Co, and eventually Glenn Reynolds picked up on the meme as well.

Well, I checked it out on Limewire and found much the same thing. But then a friend suggested searching for “*.xls” which brings up all the Excel files within my reach. Doing so actually yielded the employee roster of a small construction company in the Midwest, containing about 13 names, addresses, salaries and yes, Social Security numbers. Not a bad grab for about 5 minutes of work.

Then it occurred to me. What if I went to a site, like, oh I dunno, freecreditreport.com, and started entering in some of this information and checking credit scores and the like. I could even send in “corrections” to the credit reporting companies, and start filing credit card applications right online as well. Within minutes, I could be stealing the identities of 13 people and start charging up a storm within days. Not a bad little racket.

Of course, I did no such thing, but it is scary what can be done.

Turns out you can also mine for social security data using Google hacks.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 29th, 2005 at 9:02 am and is filed under technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.