According to the results of newly released research, threats targeting instant messaging (IM) and peer-to-peer (P2P) applications rose significantly in the first quarter of 2006 compared to the same period last year. The company examined what it calls “greynets,” programs installed on a system without permission from IT departments that are adept at evading existing security tools. Each individual incident report represents the detection of a security issue impacting one or more real-time communications channels on one day, FaceTime said. With 453 incidents recorded in the period, the number of security incidents was 723% percent higher in Q1 2006 compared to the same period last year. Multi-channel propagation was 23 times more common in Q1 2006 than the same period last year.