IM Spam
Instant messaging systems, such as Yahoo! Messenger, AIM, Windows Live Messenger, ICQ, and others that offer instant messaging, are all potential victims for spammers. These spammers regard IMs not as an important means of personal communication but rather as a tool for Instant Advertising.
Many IM systems freely display a user’s information for public viewing, such as age, sex and location. Aggressive marketers can find and use this information to send you unsolicited messages. The most common way they do this is to appear to sign on as one of your friends, then send you a link which leads to a spam site or downloads malicious viruses onto your computer. People thinking it is their friend sending the link, click and fall innocently into the spammer’s trap.
Since Yahoo and MSN are the two most popular forms of instant messaging, we are going to discuss how to keep your IM spam free using both Yahoo and MSN as examples.