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Star Wars Downloading Stealing Corporate Bandwidth
SecurityProNews
Staff Writer
2005-05-20
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Organizations may experience a slow down across their networks and risk potential legal action from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) as Star Wars fans use the BitTorrent P2P file sharing application while at work to download and share copies of "Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith."
The final episode of the Star Wars series has been leaked onto the Internet only hours after the movie opened in theaters across the globe. It is being downloaded over the popular BitTorrent file-sharing network and it is reported that a version of the movie has already been downloaded by thousands of people.
The probability of Star Wars fans downloading the movie using easily accessible broadband access at work is high and this presents organizations with two key problems. The first is the corporate network struggling to cope with the abnormal load posed by the file sharing activities, which may adversely affect legitimate use of the network by sucking up too much bandwidth. The second is that organizations that do not take steps to prevent this pirating of the movie could be at risk of legal action by the MPAA.
"BitTorrent has absolutely no legitimate use in corporate networks and CIOs and IT managers should be extremely wary of its presence within the enterprise," said Peter Shaw, CEO of Akonix Systems, Inc. "This latest Star Wars episode is causing great excitement among movie fans so it's inevitable there will be high demand for free copies of the movie. Organizations should immediately make sure that the use of BitTorrent and other file sharing applications are banned in company policies and enforcing this with a technology solution to block its use."
Products are available to help corporations defend themselves from file sharing abuse on the networks. Akonix L7 Enforcer provides protection against security risks and liability from the unauthorized use of the latest IM and P2P protocols, such as eDonkey and BitTorrent. Organizations which are unaware of the extent of IM and P2P file sharing use on their networks can determine this by using Akonix RogueAware, a free monitoring tool which detects and reports on IM and P2P activity.
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