Security

The Way You Should Fight against Instant Messaging Threats

Interested in how to remain secure while chatting?

By Bogdan Popa, Security and Search Engines Editor

28th of May 2008, 10:12 GMT

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Windows Live Messenger - a very popular instant messaging client

Yesterday, security company Kaspersky Lab published an interesting analysis concerning the main threats distributed through instant messaging clients, poiting

that spam and malware files are pretty popular on this applications. However, in case you're one of the millions of users who communicate on the Inter using IM clients, we're sure you'd want to find out the ways you could remain on the safe side and avoid dealing with these infections. Well, according to Kaspersky Lab, it could be enough to treat all incoming messages with extra caution but special security tools would also prove to be useful.

So, what could be done beside keeping the anti-virus up-to-date with the latest virus definitions and deploying the newest patches and updates?

"If a message comes from a user you know, find out whether they really sent it. And of course, do not download a file with an .exe extension and launch it. Even if the file extension is not specified in the link, you could be redirected to another page that contains malicious software," Denis Maslennikov and Boris Yampolsky wrote in the "Instant threats" analysis.

Moreover, there are several messages which should be ignored because they are likely to distribute malware or Trojan horses. For instance, you shouldn't reply to messages coming from weird nicknames - obviously created for spamming purposes - as well as messages which ask you to download files with the .exe extension.

The two security experts also explained that users should ignore or at least treat with extreme caution the "messages suggesting that the user download a program which will provide new opportunities e.g., 'NEW BUG in ICQ enabling you to create any number that does not exist'. A link in the message will no doubt lead to a program, but that program will steal the user's UIN rather than create a new account number."

TAGS:

instant messaging | virus | malware | trojan horse

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User opinions:

Comment #1 by: Chris Lees on 25 Jun 2008, 15:24 GMT	reply to this comment
Don't just look out for files transferred with a .exe at the end. Windows also treats files with .bat and .com as executables. I've seen trojans being sent that pretend to be images, with the name as the same as your e-mail address. Obviously, your e-mail address on MSN most likely ends with .com.

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