Selective content poisoning (also known as proactive or discriminatory content poisoning) attempts to detect copyright violators while allowing legitimate users to continue to enjoy the service provided by an open P2P network. For this reason, index poisoning requires less effort than other methods of attack.

Furthermore, the attacker does not have to transfer files nor respond to requests. The index poisoning attack requires less bandwidth and server resources than decoy insertion. Users will then waste time trying to establish a connection with bogus users thus increasing the average time it takes to download the file. When a user attempts to download the corrupted content, the server will fail to establish a connection due to the large volume of invalid information. Invalid information could include random content identifiers or fake IP addresses and port numbers. The attacker inserts a large amount of invalid information into the index to prevent users from finding the correct resource. Thus, this method of attack makes searching difficult for network users. The index allows users to locate the IP addresses of desired content. This method targets the index found in P2P file sharing systems.

There were known cases when a company had created a special version of a game and published it on file sharing services advertising it as cracked, having undocumented hidden functionality, making it impossible to win this variant of the game. As a result, queries return principally corrupted copies such as a blank file or executable files infected with a virus. This method consumes a large amount of computing resources since the malicious server must respond to a large quantity of requests. In order to entice users to download the decoys, malicious users may make the corrupted file available via high bandwidth connections. A malicious user pollutes the file by converting it into another format that is indistinguishable from uncorrupted files (e.g. This deters users from finding an uncorrupted version and also increases distribution of the corrupted file. Decoy insertion (or content pollution) is a method by which corrupted versions of a particular file are inserted into the network.

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