Warning issued over P2P spammers
22 April 2005
An internet start-up has issued a warning about spammers using peer-to-peer (P2P) networks
Research by Blue Security found that address books on P2P sites are being used to harvest email addresses for spamming.
People accidentally sharing confidential information through file-sharing networks are being exploited by scammers and addresses stolen from P2P sites could be used to bypass junk mail filters.
Blue Security found that popular file-sharing networks such as Kazaa, Edonkey and Gnutella are being used by scammers.
Blue Security looked at the ways in which email spam reaches recipients and the company is now working on a Do-Not-Disturb registry for email that would work in a similar way to the Do-Not-Call registries for phone owners.
Eran Reshef, founder and chief executive of Blue Security, said many people using file-sharing systems had set their PCs to share almost any file on their hard drive.
"Spammers are sitting on P2P networks and basically lurking there waiting for novice users to accidentally share their addresses," he said.
"It's not like a virus where you can do something to protect yourself," Mr Reshef added. "it's about someone else exposing your email address."
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