New Worm Targets Windows and MSN Messengers   1/24/2005 - 1,022 views,

The worm does a host of nasty things, including sending a copy of itself to all of the messaging contacts found on the victim’s computer, installing a Trojan horse program which creates a back door to the system, and even disabling the right-click button on the victim’s mouse. And once installed, the Trojan horse can log keystrokes, detect information about the user’s system, and send additional instant messenger spam (known as “spim” - for Aunty’s clever ditty on spim see here.

According to Peter Shaw, CEO of Akonix, one of the first security firms to discover Bropia.A, “Unmanaged public instant messaging is quickly becoming one of the most easily exploitable threat vectors into the enterprise. The Bropia.A worm is just the latest in a series of attacks that are targeting IM, and organizations are quickly realizing that connecting to public instant messaging networks without an IM security and management gateway in place is analogous to connecting to the Internet without a firewall.”

Of course none of you would do that, would you?

As always with worms, the best offense is a good defense, so make sure that your virus software is up-to-date!