Howdy folks,

I'm sure this is a hot topic, as this seems to be a piracy tool of choice at the moment, but for the last couple of nights I've been trying to download some halflife 2 techdemo videos that I've been told are somewhat mind-blowing (if you're sad like me and heavily into PC gaming, that is!)

Whenever I set my bittorrent .torrent file running (and I've been told this is THE WAY to download these demos without paying gamespot through the nose) I seem to soon start getting Norton Security telling me I'm getting attacks on my computer. Bittorrent seems to happily continue downloading in the background.

Obviously Norton tells me there's nothing to worry about as the attcks (and they're generally 'Invalid TCP Flags' attacks) have been blocked, but these never come up when I'm just surfing, or doing anything else on the PC.

Is Bittorrent leaving me open to attack in any way? I know it's a 'friendly thing' and I'm happy to share the demo files I'm downloading, but is the rest of my system secure while I'm doing this?

Thanks for any clarification anyone can give me.

Cheers
Joolz

For best performance bit torrent requires ports 6881-6999 to be open. I think the install will open 6881-6889 by default (your firewall should prompt you to allow access to the program). I had to manually open these ports in Zonealarm though. Of course if you don't open these ports BT will try to use them anyway and when they're blocked ZA will report a 'hacker' attempt. I'm pretty sure this is all it is.

Marc :)

ps. if you don't open all these ports you'll get a pretty slow d/l rate (i only got 10k per second until i did - now i get 125k per second most times).