Around the Net

Does IM Stand for Insecure Messaging?

When Jimmy Kuo gave his 13-year-old daughter permission to begin using America Online's AIM Express, he warned her that if she managed to download any viruses, the result would be no IM for a long, long time. Of course, since Kuo is a research fellow at IT security specialist McAfee, he's significantly better informed about the risks of instant messaging than the average parent. Because teenagers as a group are among the most active regular users of IM, lax habits at the keyboard on their part could result in a serious problem, Kuo said. At the heart of the matter is the growing number of IM-borne threats, most of which rely for their proliferation on ignorance of their existence among users and IT administrators.

Read the whole story at Cnet, March 22, 2005 »

Next story loading loading..