Phishing: Is the chat unsafe?

In the last period, we have been witnessing an important quantitative and "qualitative" increase of the phising attacks through the instant messaging programs.

The purpose of theses attacks is obtaining valuable personal information which will be redirected towards the community of users of the same program.

Users are persuaded to access a certain web address which is a site modified by hackers. There, personal information can be recorded, copied and then used for emptying the bank accounts of the victims. The attack carried out through instant messaging programs is more effective than the one through e-mail because the "tinkered" link is received from somebody in the victim's friend list, thus the credibility of the message increases.

This type of attacks which creates backdoor breaches has become one the main concerns of companies where chat became more popular.

The attack is very efficient and dangerous because your system is infected only by accessing one link. The human interaction level is minimal.

Despite classical security measures installed by the companies, hackers exploit this breach taking advantage of the user's ignorance that is unaware of this new online scamming method.

According to recent studies carried out by Websense, the number of IM attacks grew with 300% in the first trimester of 2005 compared with the third trimester of the last year.