* IM, peer-to-peer face new threats
The IMlogic Threat Center has just released a report for the first quarter of 2005 that shows a huge increase in the number of threats affecting instant messaging and peer-to-peer systems.
IMlogic found that the number of threats increased 271% during the first quarter compared to one year ago and that 48 new threats were discovered just last month. The vast majority of the threats during the first quarter of 2005 involved viruses or worms; the three leading threats were the Kelvir, Bropia and Sumom worms.
In addition to IMlogic, Akonix announced in early April that it had discovered more than 100 new security threats to IM and peer-to-peer systems during the first quarter of 2005, an increase of more than 400% compared to the first quarter of 2004 – in fact, Akonix discovered more threats from January through March 2005 than it found during all of 2004.
In addition to these threats, phishing via IM is becoming a serious problem as evidenced by the recent such attack that was propagated through the Yahoo Messenger network.
All of this is a big deal for three reasons. First, IM is used widely throughout enterprises – more than 90% of all organizations have some IM use within the corporate network and about one-quarter of all e-mail users also use IM; corporate peer-to-peer use is also widespread and growing.
Second, most IM and peer-to-peer use is outside the bounds of IT’s control – most IM use in the workplace, for example, was initiated by individual users who installed IM clients on their own. As a result, these systems largely bypass corporate defenses against viruses, worms and the like and present an avenue through which threats can easily enter a corporate network. Third, as shown above, the number of threats is increasing rapidly – think of IM and peer-to-peer threats today as about where spam was in late 2001, only with a much greater potential for doing damage.
In short, IM and peer-to-peer threats have the potential for creating havoc within corporate networks and inflicting a great deal of damage on an enterprise.
