ICQ has unfixed security flaw.

[AuraEdge]

http://www.pulse24.com/News/Top_Stor...1-009/page.asp
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/3813

ICQ is used by 100,000 Canadians
As long as ICQ is installed, a hacker could take over your computer, even if your not logged on. They can get data, reformat, or delete files remotely, even if theres a firewall in place. There are no fixes yet. They recommend to either a - find an alternative, or b - uninstall it until a fix is in place.

Source - The [H]ardOCP

[vass0922]

ICQ has a security flaw?!?!
NO WAY!!

Seriously though, for the most part having any IM proggie installed lowers security by quite a bit... especially icq/aol not sure about msn/yahoo

there was a bug for awhile where you could send a link to somebody in aol something like "aol://00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000cmd.exe dosomebadstuff.exe" and it would run it

I think they fixed that one, but still its scary

[Fingers]

I notice that although the articles are dated 1/11/02 and 1/08/02 respectively, they only specifically mention ICQ2000a and ICQ2000b. Does this alert also apply to the ICQ2001 versions?

[AuraEdge]

The second one mentions the version, but the first one doesnt. It does explicitly state that there is no fix for it, and if 2001 did not have the security hole, then that would indeed be the fix. Therefore I'm assuming that 2001 has the security hole as well.

I know IM programs usually have security holes, but not ones that effect users when thier not logged on, or ones that can cause others to remotely format your harddrive.
Thats insane.

[fastback]

i have not use icq in some time is the 2001 any good ?

[storm2k]

you'll probably dissapointed if you are used to icq98 or 99a... 2001 is full of un-necessary bloatware that slows it down... sometimes i wonder if aol's forcing all this crap into it so that people will ditch it and go back to aim.

[AuraEdge]

Is there any reason that in different countries (and different parts of the US) different IM programs are dominant?
like in canada, ICQ's dominant, and for most of the US AIM is dominant. I know around where I live, everyone uses AIM and almost no one uses ICQ.

I think ICQ came first, which is why most canadians use ICQ, but since you could use AIM to talk to people on AOL, many people in the US switched over.

ICQ got progressively bloated. The last really useful feature was file transfer, and I think that was back in 98. THe last halfway useful one was to be able to catagorize the people on your list...I think that was in 2000.

The 2001 vers eats up about 10MB of RAM though.

With loads of RAM that people have these days and knowing how to kill the ads, the latest version isnt really that bad, but theres nothing you really need in it.

[Fingers]

I absolutely agree that Chat and file transfer type programs are the playground of hackers, but I have difficulty believing that ICQ would be any more vulnerable than any other program if the application isn't even running. Perhaps they are refering to when ICQ is running, but set to "offline" status? I need to see a report that's a little less vague before I get too excited. If anyone has anymore info, I'd like to see it because I definitely have a paranoid streak in me.

BTW When I start ICQ, Zone Alarm asks me if I want ICQ to access the internet, to which I answer "YES", but it then pops up another alert that asks if I want to allow ICQ to act as a server... and I answer "NO". Now I don't know why ICQ wants to access the internet as a "server", but I AM able to use ICQ normally (and even transfer files) even though I choose not allow ICQ to act as a "server"?




fastback, I found ICQ 2000 to be very buggy. It would freeze when someone sent certain types of hyperlinks and it would often cause my browser to give me "Page cannot be displayed" error messages until I either shut down ICQ or reconnected to my ISP. I've been running ICQ2001b (build 3659) now for a few weeks now, and it's much more stable on my Win98 machines, infact I don't think I've had any trouble what-so-ever with it

[fastback]

fingers thanks I dont use it much now when Iplayed delta force landwarrior it was the thing we used but Idont play much of that now.