As operational baseline countermeasures to P2P risks, management should document and monitor P2P file-sharing technology to ensure that this capability is not utilized for unauthorized information distribution, display, processing, or reproduction. Furthermore, management should ensure the appropriate encryption is implemented to sustain an adequate telecommunications defense. Lastly, meticulous proactive security risk assessments of P2P networks can prevent inherent IT vulnerabilities from becoming threats requiring incident response resolution.

Focusing solely on access vulnerabilities, as most information security professionals are acutely aware, P2P is normally restricted to share-level security (also known as Password-Protected Share). Archetypical share-level assigned password security provisions two mutually exclusive access attributes (read-only and full) to a file, printer or other network object. Share-level security also normally lacks centralized access control capabilities. Specifically, a user ‘access matrix’ is usually absent from P2P architectures for granular authentication or authorization arbitration. Therefore, increased security risks are inherent with P2P deployment compared to other adoptable network configurations.