Arabella Hallawell, analyst at Gartner, said in a First Take that the blending of traditional virus-writing techniques and spam highlights the need for more than just updated desktop anti-virus software.
He added that IM spam, or 'spim', is a growing problem but insists neither threat undermines the potential of IM to streamline business processes and improve internal communication. Despite a growing number of IM-borne menaces such as viruses and...
We certainly face a lot of the more common ones, or the more frequently talked about ones, be it spam, be it the viruses and worms but we have mitigated to a great degree the risks associated with those.
Its Hotmail web email service is blocking 3.4 billion spam messages each day and has had two billion downloads of its malicious software removal tool in the last year, which tells us something about the overall size of the malicious software problem.
In Europe in 2006, according to analysts Radicati, 16 billion spam messages were sent each day, representing 62 per cent of all European email messages - and this figure will increase to 37 billion spam emails a day by 2010.
Lawrence Orans, a research director at Gartner who wrote a research note on Skype security, says: "While Skype's 3.0 release clearly offers some enterprise-class features, an underlying issue still remains: Skype uses a proprietary signalling...