By Dan Ilett, 10 March 2005 08:55
NEWS
Reports of malware, spam and hacking attacks over instant-messaging (IM) services are up 50 per cent this year, according to figures released by security company IMLogic's threat centre this week.
IMLogic reported more than 30 new threats have emerged since 1 January, 2005 that target IM users, including viruses, worms, and spam over IM often referred to as spim. IMLogic has issued 12 priority alerts to subscribers and customers in the last 30 days.
IMlogic's chief technology officer, Jon Sakoda, said: "IM viruses and worms are growing exponentially. Virus writers are now shifting the focus of their attack to instant messaging, which is seen as a largely unprotected channel into the enterprise."
The company found that 81 per cent of reported incidents included IM virus or worm propagation, of which 10 per cent were able to hijack file transfers. Thirteen per cent of incidents used known exploits, and 70 per cent targeted Microsoft's MSN service.
Yahoo followed behind with 18 per cent of reported incidents and AOL and ICQ shared the last 12 per cent.
The Kelvir, Bropia, and Bizex worms were reported as the top three most frequently detected IM infections in corporate environments.
Dan Ilett writes for ZDNet UK.
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1. mark wilson
Having just read your artical on im attacks i have aview to share with anyone who is interested. I have been useing yahoo im for about te past 8 years to stay in touch with friends all over the world and everything had been fine untill about 3 months ago when went to log into my yahoo acount only to be told i had entered an incorrect password, try as i might to contact yahoo and find out what had happened all i got was a silly auto response from their customer service saying to enter my account details and get my password reset, this is all well and good but who ever hacked my account also had the cheeck to change my details thus stopping me from retriving a new password. So off i went and created a new yahoo account and started again only to be hacked yet agin this week and this time not only did i lose the account the hacker also managed to breach my NAT hardware firewall and macafee firewall to leave me a little present that was tring to open an exe file over 100 time on boot up. fortunatly i work for a branch of dixons store group and have a good knowlage of computer systems aswell as the help of a few friends, i just think that it is realy bad that yahoo seems to have no interest in the security of their customers accounts and no way of contacting a real person to try and sort this kind of problem out.
(Ed note. Some people would argue that is the downside of using any free-to-use, free to download software. Why should Yahoo! pay trained helpdesk staff to fully service a free app? But we'd be interested to any other opinions.)