firewall rules for bitlord, yahoo, limewire

[RW]

On Wed, 26 Nov 2008 10:54:43 -0600
"Andrew Gould" <andrewlylegould at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 10:42 AM, Wojciech Puchar <
> wojtek at wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl> wrote:
> 
> > sorry for asking but what are this "limewire" programs are?
> >
> >
> My unofficial take on it is that limewire is a peer-to-peer sharing
> application used by Windows, Mac OS X and Linux users to share files,
> usually music, often copyrighted, over the internet. 

It's a Gnutella client written in Java.

> It is one of the
> fastest, most effective ways to spread viruses, trojans, spyware, etc.
> 
> The program does not use fixed ports, so the services are hard to
> block.  In essence, the program gets the user to bypass security
> measures from the inside.

There's nothing remarkable about that, no p2p filesharing application
uses fixed ports. Some have default ports, but they are widely ignored
because historically ISPs used those ports for throttling. 

 
> When people ask my advice about computers, I always include:  "Never
> use Limewire, or anything like it."

They are as dangerous as you want to make them, I've been using
bittorrent and eD2k for years and have never seem a single virus,
trojan etc. I've seen a few on USENET but they've always been laughably
obvious. People that end-up with that kind of thing are normally
actively seeking executables.

If anyone wants to discuss p2p blocking I'd suggest you start a new
thread.