The Web: Social Security numbers online?

CHICAGO, April 6 (UPI) -- A hacker types some computer code into an Internet search engine, such as Google or Yahoo! and finds a number of Excel spreadsheets containing private financial data, including the Social Security numbers, for hundreds of individuals. The national media have been reporting about online services, such as secret-info.com and Infosearch.com, which charge a fee to access someone's personal financial data, but leading Web browsers already allow users to do it for free -- if they know how to look, experts told UPI's The Web."You can use Excel or Lotus Notes -- and ask for forms -- and get a lot of forms indexed back to you through Google or Yahoo! indexing searches that were not supposed to be publicly available," said Peiter "Mudge" Zatko, a celebrity in the hacker community, and a division scientist at BBN Technologies, a networking company in Cambridge, Mass. "You can find spreadsheets with credit-card numbers, billing addresses and the like. There has been a lot of sloppiness in record keeping at many corporations." By Gene Koprowski