NO. 20061003

WEB IM (Web Instant Messenger) platforms provide computer users with WEB interfaces that allow them to have Instant Messenger services such as MSN and Yahoo. The convenience offered by WEB IM, however, also raises several challenges to corporations wanting to control the use of IM:

 

1. Corporate users could open a web browser, type the URLs of WEB IM sites, and easily connect to Web IM sites. Such practice cannot be controlled by a firewall because most corporations allow outgoing network access via TCP/80 (HTTP).

2. Simply blocking URLs of WEB IM sites would not work. The reason is that internal users could try to access an external HTTP proxy server first and then connect to WEB IM sites.

3. Nearly all IM auditors target on traditional IM programs only, and therefore, an internal user can easily circumvent an IM auditor's logging of their chatted messages if these users use WEB IM services.

4. According to BSST's research, some WEB IMs such as iLoveIM.com and eBuddy.com do not encrypt a user's account name and password during network packets transmission. A malicious user can sniff network traffics and easily obtain a user's IM account and password.

 

A layer-7 device, NetKeeper parses WEB IM traffics according to their protocols, and therefore NetKeeper can detect WEB IM traffics accurately. BroadWeb BSST suggests that NetKeeper users upgrade their signature patterns to versions 3.55 or later in order to detect or block the following uses of WEB IM:

 

 

Broadweb Security Service Team (BSST) - Empower Your Network Security
Broadweb NetKeeper Intruder Prevention System delivers the protection against intrusion, worms, DDOS, Instant messaging, P2P, Web-Mail, and Web Post.