January was the month when, as Akonix, a vendor of messaging security systems said, the assault on the instant messaging systems turned into a more complex and dangerous one. Even if the company traced only 14 attacks on IM systems, it wouldn’t be clever to think this is a small number because the technique of attack improved.

Although it was regarded as a new and almost ignored phenomenon, in the recent months, the IM attacks drew attention. In a report from July of Akonix, regarding the last 12 months, was announced a 78 percent increasing of the threats.

The brand new worms discovered by Akonix in January are MSNChristmas, MSNVB, Perin and Raiodin. From these, the worst looks to be Perin, installing a backdoor server on the computer via a link to contacts on MSN and AIM networks.

Don Montgomery, the Akonix vice president of marketing, stated that “Although the number of IM attacks in January 2008 is somewhat low”, the increasing intensity of them must to be an alarm signal.

The IM attacks appeared in the past year, bringing malicious code that in turn downloads other code.A variant of this attack is the two-stage one, referring to the downloading of a Trojan that waits for users to log into specific banking sites to activate a key-logging program.

And this is not all: multi-vector attacks are delivering a malicious URL by IM and are propagating through email or come in via email and go out over IM. They started to span networks too, although until now were targeted the consumer services AOL, MSN and Yahoo. Akonix declared that a new rising problem is represented by the 14 new P2P attacks from January.

The network monitoring vendor Tiversa reported that a discovery from the last year surprised them: hundreds of secret documents on peer-to-peer networks had been shared by the contractors and US government employees.