A security researcher has found it’s possible to reveal a Skype app user’s IP address without the target needing to even click a link. Microsoft said the vulnerability does not need immediate attention.
Lol I love how behind the times academics can be. This literally was a big thing used to ddos streamers back in the day like 2010s-2015s. All that needed to happen was they accepted a call and since Skypes peer to peer the hacker instantly got their IP. I remember Destiny being targeted for a while by it.
i did too. i’m genuinely not sure why it exists. microsoft is making teams into its favorite productivity app, and i can’t think of anything skype has that teams doesn’t. why does skype still exist?
Because it sucks quite a bit less than Teams. I know I’ll be sad to see it go when companies eventually switch to Teams. They’re already running side by side in most places now while companies are migrating so it’s only a matter of time. Microsoft will probably announce end of life sometime this year.
Skype basically bridged the time it took Microsoft to come up with their own conferencing solution so now that Teams is here to stay they can take Skype out back and shoot it.
that makes a lot of sense. it is quite hard to make an app worse than teams, and it seems like the more time microsoft spends on their productivity apps the worse they get (ie word, which was pretty much finished in 2004). i haven’t used skype since finding out about mumble around 2013, but can definitely see why it might be nice to have an office meeting app that is (relatively) free from microsoft’s meddling.
It’s possible it uses the same infrastructure in the background, but the interface is a lot simpler. It’s just on-on-one conversations and group conversations period. The equivalent in Teams would be the “Chat” tab – if it didn’t have all the added complexity that comes from Teams being so deeply integrated with the Microsoft online office suite (email, calendar, teams, sharepoint, onedrive and a billion other apps).
On a serious note, most of those people (activists, journalists, etc.) aren’t exactly the computer savvy types, nor have the time or resource to spend learning about matters they seldom know about, and yet they are the ones that desperately need this knowledge. They might have an important message to be sent. What would you use to spread the message in their shoes?
Sure, we the tech guys, especially subscribed to privacy related communities, can talk about Tor browser or threat modeling all day. But have you tried bring that up in social circles, if any?
Non tech minded activists will simply use the tools at their disposal: messaging apps? sure; social media apps, if looking for message amplification, whatever it runs on their cheap android phone. Metadata? IP? Profiling? Browser fingerprinting? Some are aware of it, as they also had to endure internet censorship growing up. It’s a trade they make knowingly or unknowingly between the cause and their physical and mental health.
We can laugh at their ignorance all we want, but this is how we become the Ivory tower that fuels resentment.
Was common practice in procurement for me and my team, still have contacts at ASRock / Keychron / Logitech / SteelSeries / Beacn / HYTE / Maxsun and many more.
Was a platform that was used early on and has carried through. Factories in China will commonly use WeChat but many of the more mainstream western brands will default to Skype.
Wait you can still do this? I was booting people off games when they would use the same user as their Skype over 10 years as a script kiddie, how is it not patched by now
Unfortunately, IP addresses are often MORE traceable on decentralized networks then centralized networks. How so? Lets say Alice and Bob each use their own PCs as nodes on a decentralized messaging network. None of them use a VPN or proxy. If Alice sends Bob a message directly, Bob can just grab her IP since she is using her own PC as a node. However, if they were using a centralized service, that message would’ve been routed through the service’s servers.
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