The Risks of P2P

4th April 2006

• Consumers have found that possible legal consequences of using p2p networks are not the only risk they face when illegally file-sharing.
  
  
• One of the world's most used p2p applications, Kazaa, was named as a major violator of StopBadware.org's guidelines. The group, based in Harvard and Oxford Universities, say that more than 59 million people's computers in the US have software that hampers the machine's performance (March 2006).
  
  
• Kazaa was also named as the number one spyware threat by Computer Associates International (November 2004). Spyware (small applications that install themselves on a machine and then transmit information back to somewhere else on the Internet) can be downloaded with files without the users' knowledge.
  
  
• Research from TruSecure showed that 45 per cent of the executable files downloaded through Kazaa contain malicious code like viruses and Trojan horses, after a test of 4,478 files in August 2004.
  
  
• Websense, the Internet security firm, said that almost half of executable files downloaded through Kazaa contain malicious code (December 2004).
  
  
• Many users find themselves downloading the wrong files as the names and descriptions for them can be misleading and consumers can end up with inappropriate materials.
  
  
• Paedophiles have used p2p communities to distribute pornographic materials and make contact with children.
  
  
• p2p network worms spread using the networks. The most widespread are Kazaa P2P network worms. They usually locate a Kazaa client shared folder and copy themselves there with an attractive name, of a popular song for example. Sometimes such worms replace real sound files with their copies and add executable or double extension to such files.
  
  
• Such viruses and worms open up the risk of sharing private files, unintentionally, with others over the Internet.