An unknown number of frustrated Skype customers have been pestered by spoof messages on the Microsoft service for weeks, but the company is yet to close what appears to be a gaping hole in its software.
Instead, Redmond has advised Skype users to change their account passwords. But complaints are building up about the lack of communication coming out of the Microsoft camp regarding what seems to be a Skype security flaw.
The problem first appeared late last month. One Skype user, posting in a thread that now runs to 22 pages long, said: "I received a message earlier today from a friend on my contact list whom I don't normally have Skype conversations with. The link resolves to a Russian/.ru site so I immediately knew I had been duped and closed the window before the page loaded."
Other users were quick to pile in with similar gripes about the service, while some folk moaned that their PCs had been offline when the spoofing attack occurred. Skype's support team said earlier this month that an investigation into the issue was "ongoing". But it clearly hasn't been fixed yet, given the level of grumbling over on micro-blabbing site Twitter.
In the meantime, here's the official word from Microsoft: "Our engineers are still looking into this. Meanwhile we'd recommend everyone to change their account passwords for all your Skype related accounts, i.e. also update your Microsoft account password if you linked that to your Skype account."
What about data protection issues? Professional developers originally create extra barriers to provide users with security. Of course, brilliant attackes can hack even these systems. The decryption will take dozens of years and the price will be so high that that the attack has no sense. How harmful can one (1!) line, decrypted in 28 years after the message was written be? What's more, hackers will need 28 more years to decrypt chat, because every message in the chat is encrypted in a new way.
Why is SafeUM the securest messenger? Because SafeUM has the hybrid encryption system with such features:
1) the encryption is used with the AES symmetric algorithm (Advanced encryption standard), the key transport is used with the help of EC ElGamal encryption algorithm (Elliptic Curve Cryptography) with 256 bits key size. Moreover the keys in AES are different (Direct dynamic AES* key generation scheme);
2) the guarantee of sender authenticity and data integrity by implementing digital signature mechanism.
SafeUM reliably protects everything you say from prying ears.
