Question about Firewall, P2P and security:

I've been schooled, thanks!

 

Hi connect4,

I do use P2P (torrent) clients quite a lot (for a number of years to download distros) to test firewalls ability to handle many connections but have yet to see system (attempted) compromise due directly to the P2P client (as long as the P2P client is known to be clean and downloaded from vendor site)
The main problems are from the software downloaded and allowed to be executed/installed. Certainly I am not saying all software downloaded via P2P is infected, but there is a risk.

What I do see mostly with P2P is that there can be a lot of invalid packets (bad/out of connection/invalid flags etc) I am not sure at this time if this is some attempt from others to limit the connection speed or just others having "fun" to see if some attack can be made against other users (or just a problem with the client in use). I do want to find time to check on this, but I have very limited spare time at the moment.

 

Same here.

I've also learned such a great deal from this thread.

Thanks Mrkvonic and everyone who has contributed.

ahh, that makes more sense now.

So that means that, if you sandbox the application your running, *even if the program has been exploited, *it can or cannot do any harm:

*depending on how secure your sandbox application is.

Ex: Kind of like opening a trojan / virus in the sandbox, it *cannot affect your files outside of the sandbox as long as your sandbox program has good sandboxing security.

This is very relieving to hear and I will run all my internet programs either with a. Limited Rights
b. Within a sandbox

= Good security setup

Hi Stem,

thanks for your input. Although I am actually not that experienced with firewals, ports, security except for everything I have learned so far in this thread.

For example, I have no idea what a packet, bad connection, or an invalid flag is....