14 DAY TRIAL // A recently discovered vulnerability in AIM revealed that a hacker can harm a user's computer if he manages to exploit and take advantage of the flaw. Security researchers from Core Security Technologies confirmed the issue and sustained it affects AIM 6.1 as well as 6.2 beta, the latest release of the application. In order to remain secure until the parent company rolls out a final fix you must downgrade to AIM 5.9 or 6.5, another beta version of the program. According to InformationWeek, the security engineers from AOL confirmed the flaw and added that a patch is currently in labs and will be released in the upcoming days.
"This vulnerability poses a significant security risk to millions of AIM users. Core Security has alerted AOL to this threat and has provided full technical details about the vulnerability so that they can address it in their products. Since we notified AOL, this vulnerability has emerged on several public bug-tracking Web sites," said Ivan Arce, CTO at Core Security, according to InformationWeek.
"Therefore, we believe it is necessary to bring precise details about this issue to light immediately, so that AIM users and organizations using AIM can be made aware of the threat, assess their risk, and take the appropriate measures to ensure that they are protected."
In case you haven't read the security alerts released in the last few days, the AIM vulnerability could be exploited through some Internet Explorer bugs which may enhance the hackers' attacks.
"The safety and security of AIM users is of utmost importance to us," she wrote. "To that end, we quickly take the necessary steps to block malicious content from reaching our users. We have addressed the issues that Core Security has brought to us on the server side. We are comfortable with the server side fixes we have in place, but we are also working on a client fix," an AOL spokeswoman said for InformationWeek.