How safe is P2P?
Is it really possible for someone else to download your files if you haven’t taken a positive action to indicate that you want to make specific files available? Not really, but a lot of people accidentally leave folders open for sharing. I remember when i was in college everyone shared using windows built-in sharing on the huge, campus wide LAN. Every once in a while you’d find people who had their entire C: drives shared. You see the same thing with P2P software every once in a while. Another possibility is that people’s computers might be otherwise compromised, like leaving their C: drives shared with windows sharing or having an un-patched OS that’s remotely compromise able by just knowing the IP address and hackers might use P2P software to find hackable IPs. And the biggest risk would be naive users downloading Trojans thinking they are music or something and having their machines into botnets for sending spam. But most of these articles are just about people who have accidentally
I actually had the same question yesterday. All the news stories I saw or read were lacking in details, and really did nothing but scare people. Except for downloading via uTorrent, I have no recent experience with P2P stuff, but I work with a lot of inexperienced users. So I downloaded the latest Limewire (5.0) and installed it. The DEFAULT settings would have shared all pictures, music, videos and documents on my desktop and in the My Documents folder. So yeah, its pretty easy to protect yourself–just uncheck the boxes in your sharing settings. But honestly, the fact that Limewire would try to share the entire desktop and documents folder by default is very troubling.
