Get Into The Safe IM ZoneGet Into The Safe IM Zone

Zone Labs Inc., maker of the popular ZoneAlarm desktop firewall, last week unveiled software to help secure the most popular instant–messaging applications running on Windows desktops.

IMsecure Pro blocks unwanted spam, dangerous scripts, and buffer–overflow attacks, and it also provides 56–bit encryption for IM conversations between two IMsecure users. IMsecure works with instant–messaging services offered by AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Zone Labs plans to incorporate features from IMsecure Pro into its corporate security application, Integrity, by year's end, says Frederick Felman, the company's VP of marketing.

"It's more valuable to an organization to control and secure instant–messaging authorized usage than it is to ban it outright and lose the extra productivity it may provide," says Pete Lindstrom, research director at Spire Security. "Zone adding this is part of the important trend of firewalls growing to protect the actual applications that run on the desktop."

Another feature in IMsecure Pro, MyVault, protects users from accidentally disclosing personal or sensitive information, such as credit–card numbers, that they've entered into the vault.

There initially are two versions of the security application: IMsecure Pro 1.0, which is available for download from Zone Labs' site for $19.95, and a scaled–down freeware version.

Zone Labs acquired the technology when it bought a small developer, IMsecure, about two months ago for an undisclosed sum.