Instant messaging world

On Christmas Day, most of us pick up the phone and give our friends and family a seasonal greeting call. But for people in remote locations, sending a festive message is not always an easy thing to do. Twenty years ago, the only options were a crackly long distance call or a letter sent six weeks early. Today, advances in technology mean that even if you are in the middle of the ocean, or half way up a glacier, there is always a way to send a message home. So rather than making a good excuse as to why this year's Christmas card did not arrive on time, here are some of the technological solutions on offer: E-MAIL For many, this is the cheapest and easiest choice. Electronic mail covers the entire spectrum, from basic text message, through to sound and movie files. As long as you have got an internet connection and a means of getting online, then an electronic season's greeting can be sent with just a few clicks of a button. SMS / TEXT MESSAGE Short Message Service's - or SMS...

E-mail, phones and instant messaging are just a few of the corporate communication tools business enterprise firms use every day. But these basic means of communication come with large security risks. We've put together a digest of our best expert advice to assist you protect your business from threats associated with these tools. IM ban lifting at financial companies Instant messaging software (IM) was once an unprotected application program that many financial services firms disabled. However, IM is maturing and there are realistic ways to secure the common, real-time communication. This advice explains. Out-of-band authentication: Methods for preventing fraud Out-of-band authentication can add another layer of data security as customers seek enhanced online banking security. There's also an added cost benefit. This tip delves into various methods and how they can benefit financial firms. VoIP security considerations VoIP isn't without it's security concerns. However,...

Introduction Instant messaging software and mobile voice services were made for consumers, yet they are increasingly being used in the enterprise. What options exist for enterprises to offer these services in a way that is secure and manageable? Mobile Instant Messaging (IM) provides the ability to engage in short, text-based, conversations between mobile users. There are three types of mobile instant messaging. The most popular is the Short Message Service (SMS) ¾ aka “text messaging”. Text messaging is a widely successful mobile operator service and message volume continues to grow at a rapid pace (see Figure, Source: Verisign). The genius of text messaging is its simplicity. There is no file transfer, no chat history, and no enterprise features such as message logging. Unfortunately, employees that use text messaging for business communication circumvent the ability of IT staff to enforce enterprise mobile messaging policies. Consumer IM services such as AIM, Google Talk, and Ya...

Ericsson and Intelare planning to apply text messaging to fling better security for notebooks that are lost or stolen. Ericsson now plans to incorporate Intel's new Anti-Theft PC Security technology into its mobile broadband modules. This will let a user or IT department to transmit an SMS text message to the laptop that will disable the PC and protect stored data. Lenovo and Phoenix Technologies are offering similar capabilities with Lenovo's ThinkPad notebooks. Intel and Ericsson are planning to use SMS text messages to provide an extra layer of security for laptops that have been lost or stolen. On Dec. 11, Ericsson announced that it will integrate Intel's new Anti-Theft PC Protection technology into its mobile broadband modules. The modules offer built-in support for HSPA (High-Speed Packet Access) in laptops. Intel first began talking about its Anti-Theft PC Protection, which is built into the chip set, earlier in 2008. On Dec. 1, Lenovo announced that it would offer ...

With our high-powered business environment and fluid commercial models, corporate communications is going increasingly concentrated on mobility. The associates and managers who are key to supporting customers, resolving production problems, and addressing other crucial business tasks can rarely be found at their desks. In spite of this, organizations are under pressing to better productiveness while remaining sensitive to customer demands. Those dual goals of responsiveness and productivity have given rise to demands for more functional and strong mobile communications. Mobility is not a one size fits allendeavor. divergent users want assorted capabilities and will need different degrees of mobility. Any users roam only within the building or campus, while others might spend the majority of their time outside the office. That area roaming might extend across the city, the country, or around the globe. While initial mobile solutions focused solely on voice access, the development of u...

In a new announcement, Web content security software system supplier Marshal and Web filtering technology 8e6 Technologies unchangeable an arrangement that will merge the two organizations to form Marshal8e6. The unification will combine the technology assets of both companies and is aimed at addressing the security needs of all communication streams.said it plans to supply solutions and services intended to secure internal e-mail, Web sites, and instant messaging, among another things. driving force behind our new is that the threat environment has evolved and is much smarter than it used to be: reputable websites now have malware buried deep inside; seemingly innocent emails direct users to corrupted content; and instant messages contain infected attachments. Our customers are demanding coordination of content policy and protection across all these major communications streams, and this combination addresses that need,said George Shih, CEO of 8e6 Technologies, in a prepared stateme...

Instant Messaging software (IM) as a business tool can be rather powerful, but any instrument can be abused, especially if unmanaged. The better way to manage any communication is to guarantee that communication is directed through a central point, like a gateway. Vendors have worked this and have built clients that are gateway aware and that function as both internal and external IM solutions. Recently there have been more Instant Messaging vulnerabilities. Antivirus vendors are realising that worms, viruses and other malware can spread through IM and are building new defences that reduce the risk. Links transferred by the use of IM are an additional risk, the use of application firewalls on the corporate LAN can reduce the risk, but a bigger problem is presented when users take their corporate machines offsite. On unprotected networks application layer firewalls are absent at the perimeter meaning that communication is less secure, for this reason the endpoint requires a host based ...

Communicating Chinese, Spanish and English just got a full lot easier with the set up of a multilingual chat service for Skype, named Moka Chat. Moka, the primier supplier of mobile language translation and communication services, presented the issue of its language translation technology for Skype, which gives Skype users the ability to chat in English, Spanish or Chinese with other Skype users. With over 2 billion people in the world identifying English, Chinese or Spanish as their first language, Moka is leading the way to provide mobile language translation and learning solutions in support of both the consumer and business markets for an increasingly borderless world. Having recently partnered with China Mobile to bring its mobile language translation service to the Chinese market, Moka is now expanding its reach across new markets and communication platforms with Moka Chat for Skype. Using Moka Chat, English-speaking Skype users can now easily send translated text messages to Ch...

Skype Instant messenger has a great deal to offer business. As well as giving access to the largest Voice over IP community in the world, with a potential customer base of over 300 million Skype IM users, it also allows non-Skype users to contact your business and you to contact them, at low cost anywhere in the world. This opens up a range of telephony applications. You can use SkypeOut to connect to standard PSTN phones at low cost—meaning you can call non-Skype users cheaply. You can also lease a Skype Online number using Global Direct Inward Dial (DID) to set up local access numbers outside of your town, city or country for incoming calls from non-Skype users. This allows your customers and business contacts to call you from anywhere in the world for no more than the cost of a local call—enabling your business to create a local market presence anywhere in the world. Skype also facilitates instant messaging (IM), allowing users to communicate with each other. Too good to be true? Al...

SAN FRANCISCO – Motorola Inc. launched the first phase of its end-to-end enterprise mobile computing product line, Total Enterprise Access Mobility (TEAM), at VoiceCon this week. The initial product release, TEAM Voice over Wireless LAN (VoWLAN), introduces two new ruggedized, single-mode VoWLAN smartphones designated EWP 1000 and EWP 2000, with Windows Mobile 6.1. The form factor of the phones is similar to popular cellular smartphones, measuring about 4.7 inches by 2 inches. "These are fully functional smartphones," said Imran Akbar, vice president and general manager of Converged Communications at Motorola. "We chose Windows Mobile because we really wanted to take Voice over Wireless LAN beyond just voice. So Windows Mobile gives you applications, it gives you application development and gives you things like mobile email, calendar and PIM." The TEAM release also includes two back-end servers that allow the phones to work on any wireless LAN and three leading PBX...

For some time now, cyberscum have been targeting individual users with malware designed to capture passwords, financial data and other personal information. While this certainly hurts if you're a victim, personal finances usually involve relatively small amounts. Now, evildoers are going after much bigger fish. USA Today has a story on this trend, with an unnamed Houston company serving as the nightmare scenario in the lead: An innocuous posting appeared on a Houston-based technology company's internal website on a recent Friday afternoon. A couple of workers saw it, and obeyed instructions to click on a Web link. The posting seemed trustworthy. It was on an employees-only message board. And the link referenced news about a favorite company charity. By clicking on the link, the workers infected their PCs with a virus that shut down the company's antivirus defenses, says Don Jackson, director of Threat Intelligence at Atlanta-based SecureWorks, who investigated t...

The new generation of UC is available as a software application that can be immediately deployed onto a standard server. The new generation of universal communication provides for ease of administration for IT, as well as for users. Administration of the UC solution can be performed by end-users with a minimum of training. Alternative to hardware can eliminate the need for expensive networking upgrades. Organizations need inexpensive unified Relevant Products/Services communications Relevant Products/Services (UC) solutions that can integrate with their existing IT, telephony Relevant Products/Services and mobile Relevant Products/Services environments. Such tools are now beginning to appear, offering the ability to leverage the existing infrastructure, a minimal impact on available bandwidth and simple, straightforward policy-based administration. This new generation of UC solutions streamlines the task of providing on-demand access to people and information in order to encourage coll...

Instant messaging solutions provider (ProcessOne) with over 35 million registered users in the world, today presented the launch of OneTeam, which is claimed to be the first business-class IM client for the Apple iPhone. Built on ProcessOne's renowned open-source IM platform, it provides business users with secure and flexible access to IM services. OneTeam can be downloaded from the Apple App Store on iTunes, giving users access to mobile IM on the iPhone and iPod Touch devices. OneTeam enables users to reuse their existing IM accounts through server side gateways, meaning they can get in contact with existing contacts on AIM/MobileMe, ICQ, MSN/Windows, Yahoo! and GoogleTalk. OneTeam is said to be ideally suited for business users as it can be used in a corporate environment with a businesses' own XMPP server. For the IT department this means they can much more effectively manage IM, ensuring security and compliance, while at the same time giving users the flexibility of us...

CommFort is a multi-functional client-server Internet/LAN communication software combining an advanced text chat, voice chat and file/folder exchange system. It is adored for its thought-through text chat, which besides the common "smilies" offers convenient image pasting to dialogs. The low-latency voice chat gives the feeling of talking to a person standing next to you rather than sitting a globe away. And sending a file or an entire folder is just a matter of a mouse click; the automatic block size adjustment allows reaching the highest speeds possible when exchanging files over networks with 32 kbps through 1 Gbps of bandwidth. The program takes care of incomplete file downloads, automatically picking up broken file transfers and resuming them when the network is available. With the new version of the software, peers can chat and exchange files even if a party is behind a NAT service. The latest edition features improved user authentication and flexible administration fun...

We have just published the results of a survey that we funded internally to find out how people use e-mail and instant messaging. The survey was conducted with 340 individuals in mid-October. Here's a summary of what we found: * Users in smaller organizations (up to 1,000 employees) spend a median of 33% of their workday doing something in their e-mail client, including checking or sending e-mail, arranging their schedule, managing tasks, etc. Users in larger organizations spend a median of 40% of their day doing work in e-mail. This means that in a 40-hour workweek, users spend between 2 hours / 38 minutes and 3 hours / 12 minutes doing work in e-mail. * Instant messaging, on the other hand, is used far less than e-mail – for 2% of the average e-mail user’s day in smaller organizations, and 3% for those in larger organizations. * E-mail is a very important repository of business information. In smaller organizations, 44% of the information that individuals need to do their job is ...

Increasing number of businesses presented online reflects significance and importance of online interaction between its participants. Fully understanding this necessity Flashcoms releases Corporate LAN Chat to be a communication part of a corporate structure. Corporate LAN Chat is a text/video/audio communication solution to deploy at corporate networks. It combines all the advantages of flash architecture to provide secure approach in on-site or internal network communication. Regardless of network setup Corporate Chat easily fits into any segment of a system to provide the most effective way in communication. Cutting-edge functionality coupled with clear-cut design, free interface branding which enables displaying your company credentials instead of developer's ones and advanced management options benefit businesses with all-sufficient solution. Impressive features such as built-in whiteboard serves a multi-functional purpose from presentation to online consulting, IM (ICQ, MSN) ...

Motorola, with the close of its acquisition of AirDefense at the end of last month, is wasting no time integrating AirDefense’s wireless security technology into its wireless LAN access points. Today, as part of the company’s announcement of a hardware-based wireless intrusion prevention system built into its wireless access points, Motorola noted that it’s not only eliminating the clutter of unnecessary wires but also the need for an added layer of hardware that was once needed to secure the LAN. It marks a turning point for enterprise customers who are looking at wireless networking solutions as a way of not only identifying potential cost savings but also delivering throughput that exceeds traditional ethernet. With the arrival of 802.11n technology, networks can now wirelessly move data at the rate of 300 megabits per second, compared to the 100 megabits per second in Ethernet and 54 megabits per second of previous “a” and “g” versions of 802.11. It’s also worth noting that Motoro...

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Enterprise networks are far more complex than ever before — often an amalgam of LANs, MANs and WANs — so the term “enterprise network management” has also expanded in scope. It’s really a combination of various sub-disciplines, such as configuration management, fault management (i.e., “troubleshooting”), telecom expense management, performance management and security management. Enterprise network management sits just below “systems management,” which handles higher-level issues of applications and middleware management. Fortunately, there are a huge number of products out there to help you visualize and ultimately understand your network, not to mention troubleshoot it. For many years, enterprises relied on mainstay management packages that have stood the test of time — in particular, IBM’s Tivoli and HP OpenView, a Hewlett Packard product family of network and systems management products, with optional add-ons from both HP and third parties. (Following HP’s acquisition of Mercury In...

Openfire Administration is a new book from Packt that details how to use Openfire to develop a secure instant messaging network. This book teaches users to install an efficient IM environment, and connect and integrate VoIP with users over external IM networks. Openfire, is a free, open-source and full featured Jabber-based Instant Messaging server written in Java. This book teaches users to install and run Openfire, and configure different IM clients over Windows and Linux to allow only secured connections. Users will learn the advantages of IM over other communication modes as well as Openfire's features. Through this book, system administrators will learn to connect with users over external IM networks, add users via a Directory Server like OpenLDAP and Active Directory, and import or export users and groups from other networks. They will also be shown how to add users from a remote network, transfer files across servers, and set up a server-to-server communication and an Openfi...

Many vendors offering Instant Messaging (IM) services have added new features such as voice messaging and file sharing. Among other AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo offer these IM services. Clients of Instant Messaging services are also easy prey for the community of hackers. Using a simple follow-up program, plain text of Instant Messaging can be easily captured and creates vulnerability to electronic eavesdropping. . In one version of AOL Instant Messenger, aka AIM, a user was found to be the target of an attack by hackers. The villainous hacker had developed a URL that, when clicked by the user with AIM on their desktop, allowed the attacker to run a virus to the victim system. What is particularly alarming is that AIM does not need to be conducted this type of the virus being deployed. Another possibility of an attack when the victim are simply sent an HTML e-mail with a link click, enter one or all of the following components: an increase of attack, a denial of service attacks, or install...

About 200 million people will use instant-messaging (IM) services this year, according to IDC, and next year over half of them will be business users. Many of them, in turn, will be in financial services, the business sector that has taken to IM more than any other. It has enjoyed such a meteoric rise in financial services because the convenience and productivity it puts into users' hands, at very little cost, particularly appeals to bankers, traders, and insurers. "Instant messaging is becoming a more mainstream business tool," says Andrew Brown, CTO of Global Infrastructure Services for Merrill Lynch. "IMlogic gives us enhanced capabilities regarding access control, reporting and management." However, as corporate adoption of IM peaks this year, many commentators are becoming concerned about the need to secure the informal networks upon which IM depends, both to protect against hackers and to meet regulatory requirements. The Big Bang in IM security threats Th...

Communicate more efficiently using real-time secure Business Messenger. Unlike public chat services, Business Messenger communication can be restricted to the people in your organization keeping your organization secure and private. And, all communications are SSL encrypted giving you security comparable to online banking. Whether you are at the office or on the go, there are a variety of ways to stay connected with Business Messenger. Access Business Messenger securely from any web browser or download and install the easy-to-use Business Messenger chat client on your desktop. Need even more flexibility? Business Messenger is based on the open standard XMPP for compatibility with a wide variety of chat clients. Features Include: * Business class, real-time messaging * Ability to restrict chat access to account users only for privacy and security * SSL encrypted chat * Customizable presence indicator * Multi-person chat * Secure chat rooms * Persistent chat r...

NSIT offers a secure instant messaging system called cIM? All you need is a current CNetID and password. We recommend using a client called Spark, which you can download from the Connectivity Software site (http://nsit.uchicago.edu/services/connectivity/). Like other IM clients, cIM is great for informal chatting, but it has additional benefits that also make it great for inter-departmental messaging. cIM is different from commercial instant messaging services in the following ways: * All messages remain on campus servers so long as both parties are at the University, making your messages more secure. * Messages sent between im.uchicago.edu users are not subject to the data mining often practiced by providers of commerical IM clients (e.g., Yahoo, Google, AIM). * It's easy to locate someone on cIM by using their CNetID, instead of having to search for user-created screen names. For help and information on setting up and using cIM, visit the Instant Messaging Documentati...

The instant messaging world continues to evolve at an incredibly alarming rate. IM communications most changed more than in the past 10 years with the evolution of e-mail and instant messaging (IM). Once limited to desktops, instant messaging is now available via handheld devices and cell phones, allowing users to chat from virtually anywhere, even becoming a staple mode of communication in business environments. However, its own share of security risks accompanies IM. Because IM is generally unprotected and unmonitored, it is vulnerable to attacks, and can easily expose all users in an IM contact list to the same attacks via IM sent from that machine, creating the potential for rapid proliferation. In such a scenario, it is likely that any malicious code that propagates through one of the protocols will also propagate through the other. The most prevalent threats to IM include: * Worms and Trojan horses Similar to threats sent by e-mail, worms and Trojan horses via IM can compromi...

Millions of Gmail and Google Talk users now have access to one click online collaboration. 8 October 2008, Future of Web Apps, London: Yuuguu today announced the seamless integration of the Google Talk Instant Messaging (IM) network into its real-time collaboration and web conferencing service. Yuuguu users can now share screens, hold web conferences and work collaboratively with anyone on the Google Talk IM network all via the Yuuguu application. The Google Talk IM network is accessible via the downloadable Google Talk client, and the purely browser based GMail, iGoogle and Google Apps services. The move will dramatically increase Yuuguu’s reach, with Gmail alone having over 92 million users*. Yuuguu, uniquely for a web conferencing and screen sharing service, has an integrated buddy list and chat system. Yuuguu users can now simply link to their existing Google account and any contacts they have on the Google Talk IM network will automatically appear in their Yuuguu buddy list. With...

As (UC) unified communications are getting to become much more popular, it has become apparent that unified communications networks are prone to many of the same types of security threats as normal TCP/IP networks. Some of the more common threats include things like spam directed at instant messaging, man-in-the-middle attacks, denial-of-service attacks, sniffing and the list goes on. Unfortunately, there is no way that I can possibly provide even a high-level overview of unified communications security within the confines of an article. There are simply too many aspects of the unified communications infrastructure that would need to be addressed. That being the case, I want to focus my attention on one particular component that I think deserves some of the most attention: the Office Communications Server (OCS) edge server. The edge server allows OCS to be accessible to the outside world. The OCS edge server is placed in the network's demilitarized zone and proxies requests betwee...