Secure Your Instant Messenger

If the scary prognostications in this article at TechWeb are to be believed, Your Next IM Could Be Your Network's Last.

Apparently there are some seriously lame-ass punks in the world who want to munge up your IM and use it as a means of turning your computer into one of their slave machines for their attacks. Or just delete important files or just make it so you have to stop what you were doing and repair the damage they caused.

"The scary part is that the IM worms are becoming very smart on how they use buddy lists," said [Art] Gilliland, [vp of product management at IMlogic]. "You could see infection happening relatively instantaneously."
In 2004, Symantec ran simulations that showed an IM worm could spread to s many as 500,000 machines in under 30 seconds.
"An automated, network-style IM worm would be orders of magnitude faster than that," claimed Gilliland.

Looks like its time people stepped up to more secure IM apps but then how many people are using email apps with encrypted address books? Yeah, almost no one. I guess we'll just have to learn the hard way then.
Tags: instant messenger, virus, very bad news