IM threats continue to grow...

Well, FaceTime's 2005 summary is now available on DVD, and it does indeed come with a number of special features not available on the 1 disc set. The highlights are:

• IM and P2P threats increased more than twenty-fold from 2004 to 2005.
• The frequency of IM and P2P threats are accelerating with 778 incidents recorded in Q4 2005 compared with 59 in Q1 2005.
• Quarter-on-quarter increase in security incidents is occurring at a 90% growth rate (CAGR).
• In 2005, there was a dramatic change in hacker attacks across multiple networks, where in 2004 security incidents primarily spread via one network only. Individual viruses or security breaches are 19 times more likely to use two or more public networks in Q4 2005 compared with Q1 2005.
• The MSN network experienced the largest number of incidents in both 2004 and 2005. For 2005, 57% of IM incidents targeted MSN, 37% targeted AOL, and 6% targeted Yahoo!.
• Year-on-year growth rates were largest on the AOL network with a 1,300% increase of security incidents.
• P2P file-sharing vectors, while constituting only 7% of all incidents in 2005, grew at the aggressive pace of over 5,000% vs 2004.
  

I mean...ouch. Where do you start? Over 5000% for P2P? Or how about how AOL continues to take a right old beating? Perhaps MSN becoming more and more of a scarefest?

The possibilities are endless. Admit it - this time last year, you probably didn't think about IM threats an awful lot. They caught me off guard, too - yet thankfully I was already digging into this area when the scope of the exploits really took off. In rapid succession, we had teenagers pushing sophisticated Adware affiliate scams, fake Google toolbars , Aurora putting in a guest appearance and (of course), the dreaded IM Rootkit / Botnet / BitTorrent "masterpiece", which I still consider to be the single most sophisticated daisy-chain of sheer malicious inventiveness I have ever seen.

Now, I tell anyone who will listen that IM is where all the action is. The recent acquisition of IMLogic by Symantec (more on that later) is a testament to that. You can request a full copy of the FaceTime report here. Expect even nastier things to come creeping down the pipes in 2006.

Don't worry - we'll be waiting for them ;)