Zone Labs Releasing Secure IM – Secure, For Now
from the maybe-we'll-patch,-maybe-we-won't... dept
Sam Moses writes “We all remember Zone Labs, the company that refused to patch a known security hole in their personal firewall product a few months back. Well they’re releasing a new “secure” messaging product. But one could only wonder how secure it actually is with a track record like theirs.” It’s true that Zone Labs refused to patch a security hole. The resulting negative publicity did make them change their mind and agree to patch the hole, though. However, there have been other instances where they’ve been a bit slow to respond to things. The bigger question, though, is how long until the regular IM companies realize that they need to secure their own IM offerings, and there’s no use for the Zone Labs version any more.
Comments on “Zone Labs Releasing Secure IM – Secure, For Now”
You mean aside from AOL and Yahoo
Who both support public-key based protection of IM. AOL by using s/mime for signing and encrypting messages (no one can read them) and Y! who has an SSL tunneled IM. I would be pretty surprised if there wasn’t a quick hack for pusing smime dot-eml files through MSN IM to bring s/mime there as well.
AOL IM will even use free s/mime certificates from verisign.