A worrying trend has shown its face no doubt dragged into the spotlight by the activities of those acting as poisoners of P2P networks.
http://www.newscientisttech.com/article.ns?id=dn11949&feedId=online-news_rss20Early in 2006, Keith Ross and Naoum Naoumov at the Polytechnic University, in Brooklyn, New York, demonstrated that P2P networks could be used to launch an attack without hijacking any PCs, in a published study of the eDonkey P2P network.
"In all file-sharing systems, you need a database to locate where these files are," Ross says. "The trick is to poison the database, to put bogus entries in that say that a very popular file is located at some target address that you want to attack."
A more recent study shows that BitTorrent, one of the most popular file-sharing networks, can be misused the same way. BitTorrent splits files up for sharing, which dramatically increases download speeds and also has a more centralised database than networks such as eDonkey. But Athina Markopoulou and colleagues at the University of California in Irvine, US show that it can still be used to mount a DDoS attack.
Whats funny about this is that the method mentioned is the same one used by media defender to pollute the networks, and the same thing we have been fighting with pie over for nearly two years now, the blocklist has made those trying to add false files to the network ineffectual, its a pity many users are still left unprotected by ignorance of how the network operates.
I hope this flags up to those who offer the host file the clear mesage that they are held responsible for any resulting attacks on winmx users as they are the sole means of it occuring
