Peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing client LimeWire has admitted that security is an ingoing issue for users of the Gnutella file sharing network.
“Viruses and spam continue to be a problem on the Gnutella network,” a spokesperson for the company told Computerworld Australia following the announcement that it had signed AVG to integrate its anti-virus and anti-spyware protection into LimeWire’s paid-for file sharing application, LimeWire Pro.
With the integration LimeWire Pro will now scan each downloaded file before it is launched - reducing the potential for virus propagation across the entire network.
Despite the security deal being limited to the $US21.95 LimeWire Pro upgrade, users of the company's free p2p client would not be significantly less secure on the Gnutella network.
“While we are currently only offering the AVG solution only to our Pro users, we continue to invest significant resources to kill spam and viruses for everyone on the network,” the spokesperson said.
Ongoing improvements to the LimeWire free client included user black lists, the deployment of an Adaptive Spam Filter – trained by having both users and AVG highlight found malicious files, and a ‘Dangerous File Checker’ which looks for the embedding of malicious file types into commonly known file types, the spokesperson said.
“First and foremost, we continue to arm ourselves (and our users) in our ongoing fight against viruses and spam on the Gnutella network,” the spokesperson said.
“AVG offers our LimeWire Pro users added protection, and we continue to invest significant resources to kill spam and viruses for everyone on the network. This will help address the issue [of spam and viruses], but we are constantly coming up with new anti-spam features that all our users benefit from.”