According a report just out from FaceTime, it seems that attacks on the legacy IM services (MSN, AIM, and Yahoo) continue to become more frequent and more serious. The report says this is especially worrisome for corporate IT staff. To which my response is: why are corporate IT staff allowed to run anything but Jabber? The Jabber/XMPP technologies we've been working on since 1999 require strong user authentication, reverse DNS lookups (or TLS with certificates) between servers, and server stamping of "from" addresses to prevent address spoofing; they are pure XML, which is not friendly to all those binary worms, viruses, and rootkits floating around; they are open technologies, resulting in a diverse (and therefore much more robust) client ecosystem, unlike the unhealthy monocultures of MSN, AIM, and Yahoo; they enable corporate IT staff to run their own systems behind the firewall rather than sending sensitive company communications through centralized services running in Redmond Washington, Reston Virginia, or Sunnyvale California; and so on. The result: we don't have spam, viruses, worms, rootkits, and other malware on our public network (let alone the thousands of private servers running on company intranets). Folks, it's easy to be free of all that nasty stuff -- just choose the right technology. :-)