In what may strike some as a delicious irony, I was downloading a couple of iMesh files this evening when I noticed too late that someone had uploaded a financial document from my PC.
For the record, I have a dial-up modem (no cable or DSL available out here) and no firewall, as a computer expert told me that firewalls are genreally not needed for dial-up modem users.
What security risks are there in using iMesh?
This may be of interest to others…
http://security.uchicago.edu/peer-to-peer/imesh/index.shtml
I submit that your expert is not very knowledgable. Firewalls or similar protection are very important for any computer connected to the Internet. Dialup users typically don’t have to worry about all the threats you’d be concerned with on other types of servers because a dialup user may not be running a web server, mail server, etc. They also typically get assigned a different IP every time they connect which may make them a less attractive target for some types of exploits (nb: not more secure, just less useful).
However, many crackers and script kiddies will scan the IP pool for an ISP testing exploits against every connected machine. If they’re just looking for an open machine to brag about penetrating or to add to their zombie pool, they don’t care if you’re running limited services and will crack you for the fun of it. Several honeypot projects (computers put on the net for the sole purpose of studying how crackers attack them) have found that unsecured computers will be scanned and cracked within minutes of going online. If you don’t run a strong firewall, you should consider everything on your machine to be public information as soon as you connect to a public network.