Attack on Skype, a Rumor

Dismissing buzz that Russian attackers hacked Skype's online telephony service, eBay confirmed on 17 August 2007 that there was no attack on Skype recently.

It is past a day's time that a major derailment in Skype's service has knocked millions of users offline. By the morning of August 17, while some users were able to connect to the service, the situation for many remained unchanged.

The login difficulty was neither due to attacks by computer hackers nor due to Skype's payment system under its planned maintenance scheduled for August 16, 2007, said Skype spokesman Villu Arak in a statement. Delaware Online published it on Friday August 17, 2007. Skype said on its Website that restoration of the service could take the rest of Friday, according to Arak.

But eBay thinks the disruption in the service is due to some trouble in a networking algorithm of Skype although a code posted on a Russian discussion forum on security could apparently have crippled the service via a denial of service (DoS) attack.

Code that was published unsigned on the discussion forum seems to have frozen up Skype's servers, said Valery Marchuk, the forum site's editor, in a message posting to the Full Disclosure security discussion list. PC World reported this on August 17, 2007.

The code was created to launch Skype repeatedly and flood the server with data, stated Andrew Storms, the director of security operations at nCircle Network Security Inc. PC World published Storms' statement on August 17, 2007. But Storm said he was not sure if this could potentially make a DoS impact on the entire Skype.

However, the code would not function the way it was publicized, told Stefano Zanero, CTO, Secure Network SRL in a statement that Info World published on August 17, 2007. There is no doubt the exploit code was fake, and it was not the reason of all that Skype was experiencing, Zanero added.

Skype has advised users to be patient while saying there was no need to reset the computer. Skype would start working very soon and when it resumes normal functioning, the company would issue an update.

Related article: Attacks On IM And Chinese malware On The Rise

» SPAMfighter News - 9/5/2007