http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17988 By Tony Dennis 20 August 2004 TECHNICALLY SAVVY CITY types who work in London's financial institutions have woken up to the fact that their emails are being tapped. So they've taken to using instant messaging (IM) instead. This discovery came to light when a leading forensic firm, Kroll Ontrack, spoke to Britain's FT. Kroll's Adrian Palmer told the FT that City firms have recently been asking his firm if he can help reveal how trading secrets have leaked out – probably through IM sessions. The answer, of course, is that it's very difficult to capture individual users' IM sessions. Particularly since the employers themselves would probably have to inform their City workers that they'd put such data capture tools in place. But Kroll seems to be missing a trick. If City traders have worked out ways to use IM on their desktops, they certainly will have spotted that it is relatively easy to join a standard Yahoo! or Messenger IM session via a mobile phone. All of Microsoft's smartphone offerings come with a Messenger client by default and there's plenty of Symbian apps that enable the likes of Nokia smartphones to participate in IM sessions too. Worse still, after having conversed on their mobiles via an IM session, the canny trader could finally pass the crucial bit of data – such as the name of the company whose shares are involved – via SMS. And that would be almost totally untraceable. Seems like Kroll has opened up a whole new can of worms for the City regulators to worry about. _________________________________________ Open Source Vulnerability Database (OSVDB) Everything is Vulnerable - http://www.osvdb.org/
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