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An entry on security company F-Secure’s weblog warns that a Web site claiming to offer an unreleased beta of MSN Messenger 8 is actually spreading a worm.

The site, located at msgrbeta8.com, was registered on December 24. It isn’t currently responding. According to F-Secure, “If you download and run BETA8WEBINSTALL.EXE from that site, you won’t get a new chat client. Instead, your existing MSN Messenger will start to send download links to everyone in your contact list. It also connects your machine to a botnet server.”

The entry also provides some information on identifying IM traffic from an infected system: “The download link always contains the recipients’ email address. For example, if you’d have a friend with email address huuhaa@foobar.com, he would get a download link like msgrbeta8.com/im.php?msn=huuhaa@foobar.com.”

Build 322 of MSN Messenger 7.5 is now released in full and as a QFE patch following numerous other QFE patches for beta testing this update.

The QFE released is dubbed QFE3, being the 3rd official QFE release, although it’s really the 7th patch published.

This release is intended to try and fix sign in issues, John W. from MSN has listed the following things worked on:

• A lot of people were experiencing sign in issues with v7.5.311 (QFE2), we took some changes to fix that or to give better error messages to figure out what was going wrong. And there was another fix to get our error reporting correct. As a byproduct, there have been reports that sign in is faster. If you or someone you know was having sign in issues please give the 7.5.0322 build a try.
• In Korea, if you were using an IME (Input Method Editor), you would type shortcut for your favorite emoticon and get an extra character. Now emoticons are key to any IM program and it didn’t make sense to not fix this (and we found a simple code fix). If you’ve got contacts in Korea, or know Korean yourself, give it a try!
• If you had a Dynamic Background from Blue Mountain, bought it and installed it, then the Text Ads which you should have been getting while you had a Dynamic Background on weren’t showing up.
• There is a DLL which is central to our Audio / Video features, we had to take a new version of that to fix a bug where Messenger would crash if you unplug a USB device after running the Audio Video Tuning Wizard on that device.

This update is considered important because of the sign in fixes, if you have been getting error 80048820 since updating to MSN Messenger 7.5, give this one a try and see if it works!

Three languages are available, download and install the one you want: English, French, Spanish.