In our days Internet Messengers (IMs) cannot surprise anybody. They are widely used by people connected to the Internet, by people of any age, gender and professional occupation. You can exchange jokes with your friends via your IM, discuss business questions with your colleagues, support your customers, make an appointment with your girlfriend, and even to propose marriage through your favorite messenger. A huge question arises immediately - what's about security? Are you and your recipient only ones who can see your conversation? Can anybody else access your history which is probably confidential, especially dealing business and personal questions? Can any malicious user or your boss or your parent learn your secrets?

The answer is, of course, yes, as it is expected. This article is devoted to your IM history security questions, and answers the following questions:

1. Can anybody else view my message history?
2. How is it possible?
3. Is it possible to prevent such undesirable access?
4. How can I minimize this risk?

All this questions will be examined against probably the most popular Internet Messenger - ICQ, but keep in mind that other popular messengers are very similar in all what is connected with message history.

We hope, this article will help you to keep all your secrets confidential.

Can anybody except me view my ICQ message history?

Yes. Are you surprised? If you are not novice with local networks and Internet, you probably know about amazing amount of different ways used by malicious users to get unauthorized access to resources interesting for them. The list includes such methods as keylogging, password cracking or collating, viruses distributing, DOS-attacks, using holes in operating system or popular soft like MS Outlook and MS Word, getting access with your help when you are opening love letter, funny flash or pif-file sent you via mail; finally, social engineering.
So it comes with no surprise that your message history is under the security threat. Why?

1. By default the message history IS stored, so it is accessible by anyone who has access to the corresponding message file
2. The ICQ history file IS NOT crypted, so it will not take a lot of time to extract the history from the history file.

   If you are using ICQ 200* (e.g. ICQ 2001 or ICQ 2003b) you probably have a look onto your history file which is either .idx or .fpt file and discovered that it is hardly readable. Does it calm you? You may be probably thinking: this is binary file and to get my history one should certainly run ICQ and enter my password, but my password is secure so my history is safe as long as nobody knows my password.

   The bitter truth is that

3. it IS NOT required to know your password to extract the message history from ICQ database. Moreover, new versions of ICQ store the history in XML files which are practically the same as plain text files and can be read with just the naked eye.

How is it possible?

Belkasoft has a number of tools that allow you to extract ICQ (as well as other messengers') history from ICQ database. All ICQ versions starting 99b and up to ICQ 5 are supported. These tools do not ask you for the password since, as it is said in the point 2, ICQ history is not crypted. The only thing which is required in order to extract ICQ history is 'read' access to the corresponding ICQ history file. As long as a malicious user has such access, he or she could read all your history.
But ever in case noone has access to you history file, there are still a number of ways of how to get access to your history. One of such ways is use of an ICQ network packages spy programs, so-called 'sniffers'. You can find a lot of such programs in Google just having entered 'ICQ sniffer'. Using such a program, malicious user can intercept all conversations of all users that are in the same local network (it is not fully correct statement, but roughly speaking it is true).

Is it possible to prevent undesirable access to your history?

The answer is NO with again no surprise. You can set strict security rights to your history file, e.g. set full control rights for only your account and no rights to anybody else. But please keep in mind that local administrator of your computer as well as network domain administrator can simply take ownership of such file and grant himself required rights. So, any user that has (or illegally obtains) administrator rights, has access to your ICQ database file.
You can help malicious user yourself, e.g., running some attachment sent you by behalf of your friend. The attachment, say it exe, scr or javascript file, runs under your privileges and may I guess, these are administrator privileges. So, the game is over - this program has access to your history file, can read it itself or for example send via email.

So,

How can I minimize the risk?

As there is no 100% guarantee of your ICQ message history safety, all we have is make some things reducing risk of malicious access to it.

• The best way is of course NOT to store your history at all. All messengers allow this, moreover, some of them even have message archiving off by default.
• In case you are decided to store the history, first of all, NEVER expose your ICQ database files across network. It is not crypted and there are a lot of programs that will extract history from such database as a blink of an eye.
• Place your history file to a directory available to only you (e.g under your Documents and Settings directory). Remove local as well domain administrators’ access rights from this directory properties.
• To avoid intercepting your messages with sniffer, consider using QIP (http://qip.ru) - client that support ICQ protocol and is able to encrypt your messages. There are also a number to plugins for ICQ client that do the same staff, e.g. Top Secret Messenger or PGP ICQ.
• Explore the same basic security rules that are recommended for other security reasons: do not work under administrator rights, never run attachments even in case they were sent by your friend.
• Do not trust anything you have received via your ICQ. It is easily possible to pretend to be any given ICQ user (well, almost any) so your ICQ friend is possibly not your friend at this particular moment. Reverify all the important things with another means of communication. Avoid using ICQ for confidential and other important communication. Use mail with PGP encryption instead, phone calls and personal meetings.
• Consider the following schema: using Belkasoft Universal IM History Extractor Pro, store backup version of your history in the text or HTML file regularly. Put this file under directory only you has access to. As only you choose the name and the place for such file, spy programs know nothing about the file and will not find it. After backuping the history flush your IM history file with the means of the messenger.

Note: Such popular messengers as Yahoo! Messenger and &RQ store their history in binary files that you could consider crypted. But alas - they are not. Belkasoft has extractors for &RQ and Yahoo! Messenger also that don't ask you for a password.

Conclusion

We hope in our article we managed to show you that you should consider thinking more carefully about your messenger history security. We hope our advices will help you communicate securily with your Internet Messenger and your secrets will always stay only your secrets.