Instant Messaging continues to be the fastest growing communications medium of all time with an estimated 300 million consumer and enterprise IM users in 2005. Global services such as AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo! Messenger each report over 1 billion messages sent per day, and IM traffic is expected to exceed email traffic by the end of 2006. As one of the most successful and widely-deployed applications on the Internet, IM has increasingly become the target for attackers to propagate IM-borne viruses, worms, spam over IM (SPIM), malware and phishing attacks.

Though widespread in adoption, IM is generally unprotected and unmonitored in consumer and enterprise environments, leaving it vulnerable to attacks and exploits. These attacks have grown exponentially over the past 3 years, increasing the need for real-time threat protections for IM and other real-time communications applications.

One very common form of P2P networking is Instant Messaging (IM) where software applications, such as MSN Messenger or AOL Instant Messenger, for example, allow users to chat via text messages in real-time. While most vendors offer a free version of their IM software others have begun to focus on enterprise versions of IM software as business and corporations have moved towards implementing IM as a standard communications tool for business. Please also see Peer-To-Peer.