someone using my IM

The other night something weird happened to me. I was talking to a friend in IM and then someone else assumed my identity and typed in message in our conversation. I could not see what they were typing but my friend asked me why i had just said what she read. She copied the text for me and showed it to me. And I had definitely not typed what she showed me. It was pretty harmless, but still I don't people to be able to talk as me through my IMs.
Has anyone heard of this? And do you know how to protect yourself from this happening?

Thanks

Change your password for a start.

I thought of that already!

I have often been puzzled when I saw that, but if I remember correctly, it was a different color message?

It doesn't happen very often, but sometimes SL instant messages do get misdirected. The IM could have been from an entirely different conversation and an unrelated person who has no idea it happened. But that person might be peeved that the intended recipient didn't acknowledge it.

Changing your password is good.

Do a scan for keyloggers, as well.

Spybot S&D:
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/spybotsd/index.html

Adaware Free:
http://www.lavasoftusa.com/products/ad_aware_free.php

Kaspersky Online Scan:
http://www.kaspersky.com/virusscanner

(Note, the Kaspersky online scan won't remove anything, it's a promo to get you to buy their product, but it'll at least tell you whether you're infected.)

And, as noted, it's a rare bug, but does happen where IM sessions "intersect" in odd ways.

The message was the same color as the other. The thing that makes me think that it was not random or an error is that there were 3 different entries and someone had a spy chat bug on me last week. I don't know why, I am really not that interesting!

Don't touch the kaspersky! It's a form of adware itself - it returns false positives to get you to buy. Spybot is the best by far; so good infact that many organisations such as universities use it.

IM or Chat? Someone can do this in Chat with a Mystitool, but I don't think it can send an IM with a fake identity.

It was in IM.

One other thing, if you are already logged in and another session successfully starts, the older session is logged out. So a leaked password seems unlikely here.

The only things it detected on my system were genuine viruses attached to old email spam from ebay spoofs.

Anyone can spoof IMs: they can make any text appear in the IM window, saying it's from anyone (even a non-existent avatar) and make it say anything at all. However, the IM tab will have their real name on it, even though in the IM it says the wrong name.

There's nothing you can do about it.

Not true. Kaspersky is a lot of times a bit "hyperactive", but that is the same with the standalone virus protection. It is just very, very suspicious of anything that moves *g* and resulting in that, it gets top grades in virus recognition in every test I have seen so far. It is indeed a bit unnerving to be warned so often, though...

Edited to add:

Yes, I do use it myself. No, I have never had any trouble with my system since then. Just a hyperactive little helper.

I agree.. use Spybot. That is what I have on my system and it does a great job of protecting it. It has features that go well beyond other free programs.

So are you telling me this gets into the computer Via the sl client? wonders

If this is true then abuse reports about others could be faked just as well.........if one cuts and paste text from IM..............puzzling here about all this.

I don't believe you. Show me.

I maintain that Kaspersky returns false positives when you use the demo version. I have seen it with my own eyes.

It's easy to fake an IM with an object script that changes the object name (to whatever it wants) and sends an IM to the recipient. However, these object IMs appear in a different color and though they have "IM" in front, they never appear in an IM window.

Using slproxy you can do some things that shouldn't be permitted, such as sending blue system messages saying anything to anyone. Perhaps it's also possible to forge IMs, though I suspect it would indeed appear in an IM window with the actual login name in the tab, as mentioned above.

Feldspar speaks the truth, but was that a group or conference IM?

Quikies also are Bazooka http://www.kephyr.com/spywarescanner/
& Stinger http://vil.nai.com/vil/stinger/
Besides, the ones mentioned.

This was a direct IM conversation between a friend and I only. And the message appeared directly into our conversation, in the same color as our conversation and no new IM tab appeared.

Screenshot?

Unfortunately, I don't have a screenshot!