Peer-to-peer is nice on the local home network, but exchanging files over P2P on the Internet can be an insecure habit. The attitude to some forms of it is gradually changing.
P2P means also a business liability, and it can be dangerous in various ways. For us the main reason is that it is a source of spreading various forms of malware non-solicited. So you better go looking for safe alternatives offered by your local ISP, for a small fee they enable you to secure downloads to all sort of content. Why P2P is a risk, you read here: http://www.mainstream.net/security_howto/dangers_of_p2p_file_sharing.shtml
A little off the subject but still falls under this topic i believe(if not i apologize)… In order to protect users from the increasing threat of downloading malware from p2p networks avast! has included the p2p shield in it’s antivirus(and that’s very good) some time ago. What that means is that avast! automatically scans all the files which are downloaded by your favorite p2p program so that it can protect you from downloading malware…
But here is my problem. I have been using bittorrent network for a long time now and all this time I’ve been using a torrent client called AZUREUS(or the MEMORY FROG as i like to call it) which still hasn’t been added to avast’s p2p shield! Now if i remember correctly there was a problem with adding it to the p2p shield because azureus was using the process javaw.exe for downloading stuff(remember those timeout issues with javaw.exe anyone???)…
Well ever since version 2.4.0.0 azureus is using the process AZUREUS.EXE now and no more javaw.exe… So the way i see it there shouldn’t be a problem adding azureus to the p2p shield anymore. Am i assuming correctly?
I would really appreciate it(and alot of other azureus users who are running avast! av’s) if someone from alwil looked into this and perhaps respond to my post…
Securing P2P can be done. Solutions only work through combinations of solutions, else they are in some way backdoored (holes are shot into it for various reasons). An example of this (which has nothing to do with P2P-ing, but demonstrates this principle): TORPARK with delay was not tracable, but they had to take the delay out for the snoops to still have access. TORPARK works like it should, only in combination with privoxy for the delays or a random delay script, so “they"cannot trace back where you have been, alas when you use the common search function on your desktop all this info also is”.