14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft's instant messaging solution has gone, during the past two months, through one of its most agitated periods, in terms of security and online stability.
MSN users were constantly attacked by a series of worms, and even when the malicious attacks subsided, problems still kept arising, this time the overloaded servers being the source of the trouble.
The most recent threats to MSN are the newly arisen Kelvir.a and Kelvir.b, two worms that came out last week-end and immediately started to spread. Both worms use the same spreading mechanism, sending a message to all the MSN contacts found on the infected platform.
The message includes a link, and once the link is accessed, the users are redirected to a download site of the Spybot worm, which opens a backdoor on the infected system, leaving the computer vulnerable to hacking attacks.
The beginning of this week was a prolific time for new forms of malware, since yet another worm appeared: Summon.S, which spreads through MSN's instant messaging clients (MSN and Windows Messenger), but was also discovered on peer-to-peer file sharing networks. This worm disables the security solutions installed on the system, attempts to rewrite the HOST files, as to prevent the access to the most well known security software sites, and then it accesses several addresses to download corrupted files.
Information on Klevir's removal can be found here