I was taking a look at some P2P stuff for our Reputational Risk work when I bumped into the LimeWire safety page. This is a page that is (I suppose) intended to educate users on the risks associated with P2P file sharing networks and the use of LimeWire specifically. I really thought it was interesting.

The page is: http://www.limewire.com/legal/safety

Some of the items the page covers are: copyright infringement, careful shared content selection (to avoid leaking documents, spreadsheets, etc. and entire drives/folders), adult content, spyware/malware cautions and lots of language about default behaviors. Now to be sure, the authors of LimeWire have implemented new controls in their version 5 software to make it more difficult for users to make mistakes and share the wrong contents. Even given that, I still caution everyone to do their own risk/reward assessment before using such a tool.

The bottom line is this. Check out the page, because as infosec folks, we need to be aware of what topics we need to continue to talk about with others. Educating them in how to configure this type of tool, should they choose to use it, might be a powerful way to help them (and maybe your organization) remain safer online. At the very least, it seems that LimeWire has at least done a good job of trying to caution people about the problems with using their tool. That, at the very least, is quite admirable!