The music industry may have found a new friend in its fight against P2P networks – evil spammers and spyware makers – because a new report suggests that the use of file sharing networks opens up a user’s computer to all sorts of frustrating adware and spamming nonsense.
The report from network protection firm Blue Security (who, admittedly, aren’t completely unbiased given that they sell the software to combat such IT security violations) warns that unsophisticated peer-to-peer users often expose folders containing valuable personal information to other people using the P2P network. Spam companies are using this opportunity to ‘harvest’ email addresses, allowing them to collate much more accurate databases of addresses to which they can send junk mail (at the moment most spammers use a random generator system that guesses email addresses). If the P2P network is on a corporate LAN network, hackers and spammers could gain access to data from across a company’s IT system.
The potential security risk of using P2P software is not new, of course, but the report suggests more and more spyware and adware companies are now manipulating that potential, making the risk of intrusion much more real. Those opposing the use of P2P, like the record labels and film studios, are sure to make much of these security risks in their bid to stop people from using the file-sharing software.