14 DAY TRIAL // Not long ago, the MSN instant messenger client was struck by a series of vicious worms and also a wave of "data center vulnerabilities and crashes".
The first to hit was the Bropia.A -which disseminated itself by files claiming to be funny or lewd pictures with filenames such as love_me.pif, drunk_lol.pif and the like. This particular worm was matched by backdoor software, a variant of Rbot, on infected machines. This copied itself as LEXPLORE.EXE and logged keystrokes, system information and had an overall negative impact on the infected PC.
Security monitors later discovered the Bropia.F worm which was using MSN Messenger to spread. Trend Micro has issued a 'medium risk' alert on the worm, which attempts to send copies of itself in different filenames to all online contacts, pretending to be alluring images.
This was followed by another mishap for the Microsoft bunch, meaning a problem that affected a "significant" number of MSN Messenger users intermittently for a couple of days.
To head off a widespread, invisible attack, Microsoft friday went proactive, locking out all accounts and making updates mandatory for users of its vulnerable MSN Messenger. Starting Friday, all users of MSN Messenger were locked out in an attempt to prevent an exploit from invisibly sweeping through PCs running the software.
A company's spokesman said that all MSN users must be aware that the exploit code was public and urged them to patch their systems. The company made updates mandatory for all users, preventing access to their accounts otherwise. Users who tried to sign in with outdated versions were automatically prompted to update their software. Users with a version of MSN Messenger earlier than 6.2.0205 must update to that edition, or the beta of MSN Messenger 7.0, before they're able to log on.
For those who use MSN Messenger here is available version 7 beta build 0604