P2P EATS BABIES, LAUNCHES MISSLES TOO!

Ok this isn't politcal in nature but it does need some rational thinking..



Recently a news piece is making the rounds about how data on marine one was leaked to iran, marine one being the american president's helicopter. The data covered the plane's layout its wiring, and its missle defense system.



The article, and the company responsible for the "discovery" of the data leak, refuse to mention what specific p2p network was used. Heres reuters take but there are many more hits for the story.



http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idUSN0242383320090302



the company, called http://www.tiversa.com/ has made a niche market for themselves as the security experts on all matters P2P. This self imposed task, by which they hope to get rich I might add, is accomplished by monitoring peer to peer networks using monitoring software and then notifying people who have had content distributed in an infringing manner that it would have been easy to stop this behaviour if only they had hired them in the first place.



To scare companies into hiring them they like to lump all P2P together in the ability to give access of your entire hard-drive to the whole of the internet.



As it turns out this is false. By using weasel words like "most" and "virtualy" they are able to change the facts into this nightmare scenerio that requires all P2P to be stopped and banned on most if not all people's computer wether home or at work.



they are not the only ones though. Way back in May 07, 2008 Dan Kaplan wrote an article about McAfee announcing how they discovered "infection impacting hundreds of thousands of users whose machines contain poisoned media files" (I only mention the old article because it was featured beside the article on Obama's 'copter as related topic)



I implore you to not get your sole opinion from the article I am about to link to, I am only linking to it so that you have a refrence for the rest of my post.

http://www.scmagazineus.com/Fake-P2P-media-files-lead-to-adware-attack/article/109894/


media files do not harm your computer - its when you are dumb enough to click on a link or executable that the poster of the BROKEN file tells you will make the file work.



the article DOES go on to make that point.. albeit vaguely. But worst of all is when Minaxi Gupta, assistant professor of computer science at the Indiana University in Bloomington states:



“The only thing you can do [to protect yourself] is not join a P2P network and not download anything, or you can scan it to anti-virus when you get something,” she said. “Most people don't do that.”



So here are the facts.



Its when your employers are using OUTDATED P2P software instead of Torrents, that the contents of your hard-drive can be served on platter so to speak to the rest of the world. With torrents, you only serve what you create a torrent file for so since you have to select the contents you are sure to witness what is going into it. It was Kazaa and Napster and their spin-offs that had a "pick a directory" mentality to what data of yours to serve.



so. As a company, inforce a scan everything for viri policy, a policy against any codecs, dlls, or un-scanned executables being installed by anyone other than your company's I.T. guy and you will be fine.



Its when you freak out over the three letters P2P that you might miss out on some usefull collabrative software that just so happens to fall under that header. Also if you follow the above ideas you can save yourself the trouble of hiring a firm whose sole job is to spook you into hiring them.