The main chat systems were targeted by a series of a worm attacks that used important contemporary events, especially Star Wars's launching, to spread, warns security companies.

Using the publicity associated with Star Wars: Episode III, Revenge of the Sith, the hackers launched phishing attacks against Yahoo Messenger users, announces IMLogic, a security company specialized in the protection of instant messaging networks.

The attack is a "success" because the message containing the phishing elements looks like it was sent by one of the contacts from the Buddy List. The text contains a web address which makes reference StarGames. Once this page is accessed and the user types in the Yahoo login information for the alleged game access, a trojan will be automatically downloaded and it will send the same massages to all the friends from the victim's list. Immediately after, all the identification data for Yahoo recorded by the trojan are sent to the hacker that devised the system.

The attacker will have then full access to the victim's e-mail account allowing him to extract personal information and use the account to send new e-mail messages.

Another worm targeting chat systems is Funny.Movie.AOL which hit America Online; the structure of this worm is very similar to the one of Kelvir and Bropia. This one tries to convince users to access a link and to download malicious code by using the text "hehe i found this funny movie", and the message contains the address of a dangerous site.