Security Basics: RE: ICQ Corporate Security Risks

[<adisegna () siscocorp com>]

I just wanted to introduce some questions:

Are you currently logging all the traffic and conversations? I'm not
familiar with the ICQ server. Can traffic be encrypted? Can you
configure chat only, no URLs or files?

Why not use webmail?

Thanks

AD
Information Technology Group


-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew Aris [mailto:andrew () dev bigfishinternet co uk] 
Sent: Monday, March 14, 2005 5:34 AM
To: security-basics () securityfocus com
Subject: ICQ Corporate Security Risks

Hi guys,

Just looking for a quick sort of straw poll really, my company runs an
internal ICQ corporate server for internal IM and we occasionally have
people who are out on the road who need to communicate with people back
at
the office, the current method is to VPN in to the XP Pro box that hosts
the
ICQ and connect to it that way, however the drawbacks of this are that
a)
only one person can do it at any one time b) sending ICQ messages is
clunky
as you have to wait for the direct connection attempt to time out and
then
"send through server". The proposed solution is to open the ICQ port on
the
firewall and then port forward to the appropriate machine thus solving
both
the problems.

My question is how great a security risk do people think this would be?

cheers,

Andrew