IM uptake rockets

The IDC expects the worldwide enterprise instant messaging (IM) applications market to rocket from $315 million in 2005 to $736 million in 2009, says Top Tech News.

According to the study, the value and use of IM applications for business will continue to increase rapidly for at least another four years.

An indicator of this rapid growth is the fact that 28 million business users worldwide used enterprise IM products to send nearly one billion messages a day in 2005, says IDC`s program director for computing research Robert P Mahowald.

The IMlogic Threat Centre forecasts accelerated IM threat growth for the remainder of 2005 as hackers capitalise on the growing popularity of IM in both consumer and corporate environments, says the Sarbanes-Oxley compliance journal.

According to the centre`s latest report, IM and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) security attacks have increased more than 14 times through the first three quarters of 2005. The report says 87% of reported incidents include IM worm propagation; 12% hijack IM file transfer capability to deliver viruses and 1% use known client vulnerabilities.

Of reported incidents over IM networks, 31% targeted the AOL Instant Messenger Client, AOL Instant Messenger Network, ICQ Client and ICQ Network.

CipherTrust, an e-mail security vendor, has entered the IM market with the release of a gateway IM security system, ITWeek reports.

Named IronIM, the system can protect organisations against inbound threats such as spam and viruses, as well as outbound problems such as the transmission of inappropriate content.

The system supports all the major protocols including Yahoo Messenger and Google Talk, says CipherTrust research engineer Dmitri Alperovitch. The learning curve will be minimal for security administrators, he says.