AOL Urges ICQ Program Updates

AOL urged users of older versions of its ICQ instant-messaging program to upgrade to the latest version because of a new security hole that could leave computers vulnerable to hacking.

A spokesman for Dulles, Va.-based AOL Time Warner Inc. said a bug was found in the voice/video and games features in versions earlier than version 2001b of ICQ, which was released in October.

The problem results when the application is flooded with more code than it can handle, triggering a so-called buffer overflow error and allowing extraneous code to be executed. That could allow someone to download malicious code onto a targeted computer.

The newest version of ICQ can be downloaded from www.icq.com/download/.