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Submitted by: Bill Hickey
NCVA List Master

NRT-0259 IM Attacks Increase:

Malicious code attacks over instant messaging networks are up almost 80% over last year, according to a new study from vendor Akonix. In July, the company, which develops IM hygiene and compliance appliances and services, said it uncovered 20 malicious code attacks over IM in July. The company said the total number of threats for 20007 so far is 226, which is a 78% increase over the last year. The company also said attacks on peer-to-peer networks, such as Kazaa and eDonkey, increased 357% in July 2007 over July 2006. That report comes on the heels of a report by peer-to-peer network monitoring vendor Tiversa, which found contractors and US government employees are sharing hundreds of secret documents on peer-to-peer networks. The new worms included Exploit-YIMCAM, Hupigon-SJ, InsideChatSpy, SpyPal, StealthChatMon, Svich, and YahooSpyMon. Akonix officials say the attacks are moving beyond the nuiscance stage and getting more malicious. They said their IM Security Center is also seeing two stage attacks with the second stage being the downloading of a Trojan that waits for users to log into specific banking sites to activate a key- logging program. In addition, they report seeing multi-vector attacks where a malicious URL may be delivered by IM, but propagated using email or come in via email and go out over IM, and attacks, focused on consumer services AOL, MSN and Yahoo, are beginning to span networks.

(NetworkWorld 28Jul07)

Last Modified: Tuesday, 31-Jul-2007 23:05:14 EDT