We all know that Akamai netsessions was originally designed to be peer to peer to enable Akamai to offload traffic from their servers.

Peer to peer is notorious for being a significant security vulnerability on any computer on which it is installed. Akamai received significant push back from potential customers, and to placate people nerfed netsessions to run in a non peer mode.

Unfortunately, Akamai did a half ass job on the task, as their heart really wasn't in it. They couldn't even be bothered to craft a separate EULA for the non peer to peer version. As it turns out, they didn't refactor the app to pull out the peer to peer support. Instead, they just used a switch to branch around the security vulnerabilities.

The kicker is, they didn't compile separate executables. Instead, it is just a configuration option, read at start up. Where is it read from? Well, where do you store configuration information on Windows? Yep, right where anyone can easily alter it, and flip on peer to peer mode.

Who would do that? Anyone who can wedge a small piece of executable code on your system, and then need a open conduit, bypassing the firewall (because the firewall gives Akamai full access), to send and receive any data it wants to from your computer.

What bytes do you need to twiddle to make this work? Sorry, I'm not going to tell you that. If you really want to do something nefarious, you are going to have to work out that part for yourselves......

People can break into my computer and steal my stuff?

I took the other path and just use pyLOTRO so I could uninstall Akamai.  Its not needed in any way for DDO to update and run.  Some people on the other forum have posted problems with getting rid of Akamai, but I didn't have any such problems and after a couple reboots still havn't seen Akamai reinstall or running anywhere and couldn't find any of its folders on my drive.

This sounds like Microsoft Windows