ANTI-P2P SERVICES

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File sharing has become a popular pastime. Many people spend their time at work using peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing programs to copy their favorite songs and movies, because their work Internet connection is often much faster than their home Internet connection, and their IP address at work identifies their employer and not them. To avoid legal liability and improve network efficiency, many corporations have turned to anti-P2P services and software. These solutions scan a network to detect abnormal bandwidth usage (which could indicate file sharing activity among employees), and they can also identify specific file sharing programs on a computer, such as Grokster or Kazaa.

Anti-P2P software is likely to become as popular and necessary for corporations as antivirus software. With the continuing spread of file sharing programs, anti-P2P software could become the computer market’s next growth industry. For a quick peek at some of the more prominent anti-P2P software, visit Packeteer (http://www.packeteer.com), which is shown in Figure 17-5, Allot (http://www.allot.com), or AssetMetrix (http://www.assetmetrix.com).

Figure 17-5: To uncover file sharing programs, a program like Packeteer looks at which programs are accessing a network and their bandwidth consumption.

Audible Magic (http://www.audiblemagic.com) has teamed up with Palisade Systems (http://www.palisadesys.com) to create a program that intercepts all traffic on a network, makes a copy of it, and then examines that copy to look for telltale signs of file sharing, such as Kazaa or Gnutella file sharing. If the program finds a match with Audible Magic’s database of digital “fingerprints” for commonly pirated files, the program stops the file transmission.

While corporations may be interested in keeping their workers from accessing file sharing programs, other companies are targeting parents, warning that their children could be accessing pornography through file sharing networks. Media Defender (http://www.mediadefender.com) even sells a program dubbed Peer Protector, which can delete previously downloaded files and disable file sharing programs like Kazaa so they don’t work at all.

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