Death of the IM-Worm?

A short analysis piece from the folks over at VirusList, which is always a good site. This piece looks at the IM worm. I had expected 2006 to be the year of the IM worm, everything pointed that way. Looks like I was wrong. We still see a lot of bots have IM capabilities in them, but we're not seeing many pure IM worms. This article looks at the first half of 2006 and the trends in the IM worm space.

This article examines the evolution of the IM worm since the beginning of 2005. It is written from a European standpoint: this means that it does not include information about certain IM-Worms which did not spread widely in Europe. It also does not cover the topic of malware for certain IM clients such as icq, which are less commonly used in Europe.

Although the first IM-Worm appeared in 2001, this type of malware didn’t become really common until the beginning of 2005. If we take a look at this period, it becomes clear that it’s very important to differentiate between IM Worms which were written with a range of aims.

Source: Death of the IM-Worm?, Roel Schouwenberg, Senior Research Engineer, Kaspersky Lab BNL.