A scary report for anyone who uses MSN: a new worm called Bropia.A is in the wild and can spread to you via MSN Messenger just by having an MSN Messenger window open. The payload is to install a trojan program called "Rbot" which can open a backdoor in your system and has features that collect keystrokes, relay spam and collect other information about your system. It also can disable your right-click context menus and adjust your sound mixer settings, though I wouldn't be as worried about those as the key logger or spam relay.
Even though Bropia is rated a "low" threat by anti-virus vendors, it's one of the few IM viruses that is able to spread without user intervention (like clicking on a link to download and run some malware). I'm not usually wild about scare tactics, but good grief. If someone wrote a good IM worm that could spread rapidly, there could be pretty severe damage. Do you really want to be on MSN when that happens? :)
Just another good reason that BitWise is pretty wise.
For those interested, here's the article at InfoWorld.
I'll post some news about the next BitWise Beta tomorrow.