Exposed: what Microsoft don't want you to receive

After the recent news that Microsoft is now censoring users of its instant messaging software from receiving messages containing .info, as well as things like .pif which they were already blocking, I decided to do some research to find out what else they think could pose a security risk to you and your computer and censor.

The list of blocked strings is stored on the Messenger servers so that it can be quickly downloaded to instantly update your Messenger with any new entries without you having to download a whole new version. After playing around a bit with the Messenger protocol (aka MSNP) I managed to retrieve the list from the servers.

Unless there was a problem downloading the list, which there didn't appear to, the Messenger team have started removing the end of lots of strings - presumably to try and stop even more bad site links getting sent. For example .p used to be .pif and .s used to be .scr and on several other strings .ph used to be .php, .e used to be .exe and .c used to be .com.

Because the list currently contains 124 entries I've made an image containing them all. This also means that you cannot easily copy the text to try and visit any of the URLs in the list which would potentially end in your computer being infected with some kind of virus, adware, spyware or worm, or expose you to phishing scams.

>> View the image of the list of censored strings

>> If you want to find out more about how these entries are used or why the .* in some strings actually slows your computer down then there is a discussion expanding upon these ideas started by TheBlasphemer, the creator of StuffPlug, over at the StuffPlug forums.