Any security in Utorrent?

Hey..

My dad is constantly complaining about Utorrent, that it would be dangerous and that hackers can get very easily in our computer.. And also in my moms.. Is this true? I did forward a port for Utorrent?

Please answer!!!

µTorrent has no known security holes, and port forwarding in itself is not dangerous unless the listening application is insecure, so "untrue" is your answer.

Unlike most download programs (namely p2p) out there µtorrent only shares the file you chose to download, and even then only for as long as you keep the torrent running in µtorrent. Most p2p applications out there allow you to select a folder and everything in that folder is then shared over the internet. Improper configuration of these applications could indeed be very dangerous and indeed there have been application that had security flaws that could be abused by knowledgeable malicious users.

But µtorrent does not suffer from this problem. No matter how you configure your µtorrent there is no way anyone can get access to anything on your drive. You can't accidentally share something. No hacker can get access anything on your drive. And even of the torrents that you have running your µtorrent client decides which pieces of the material it sends to whom.

Your mom's PC doesn't even have anything to do with µtorrent.

However you should be aware that it can still be illegal to download certain material (depends on the material and your local laws) and that there are means for the authorities to track you down, especially in the US. µtorrent doesn't protect you from that but thats not a flaw of µtorrent. It boils down to you being able to identify yourself what material is legal and which is not according to your local laws and you being responsible for those decisions yourself.

I hope this clears things up for you and your parents.

Special-purpose programs in general tend to be a little more secure than multipurpose "kitchen sink" ones.

The smaller a program is, the less leftover (buggy) code there likely is to be a security risk or hole.

Code that has been reviewed for bugs by numerous 3rd parties (especially those that have a vested interest in the code working well) tends to have less security flaws.

I'd be shocked if there's ever any sort of security problem related to µTorrent -- outside people trying to put their router in DMZ mode so their computer isn't firewalled...which is really a networking security issue, not something µTorrent-specific!

Of course, someone could write a malicious program that checks what port µT is running on, closes it, then opens that port for outside attack.

But that wouldn't work if you had a software firewall. Besides, if such software got on to your computer, you have bigger problems.

It could and would check for any ports opened waiting for incoming connections. Not using µtorrent will likely not save you in that case.