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Chatting is the hot new venue for virus and malware authors. A new study says that malicious attacks over IM networks are up almost 80 percent compared to last year.
Akonix, which just [released the statistics][1] over the weekend is in the business of developing IM "cleaning" services so you might want to take the numbers with a grain of salt, but still, according to Akonix's survey there have been 226 exploits for IM networks this year, which is just over one a day.
Compare that with last year's numbers and there's no doubt that IM is finally starting to attract the kind of attacks that other networks have suffered for years.
Akonix also says that older peer-to-peer networks, such as Kazaa and eDonkey, are increasing beset by malware. The company found 32 attacks just in the month of July.
With system admins spending so much time and effort clamping down large e-mail networks, it makes sense that hackers would move on to the thus-far soft underbellies of IM and P2P.
As with everything else in the online world, make sure you trust your IM contacts before clicking a link or downloading any files sent over IM.
[1]: http://www.akonix.com/press/releases-details.asp?id=138
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