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Did Russian Hackers Crash Skype?

Posted by kdawson on from the flicking-a-domino dept.

An anonymous reader sends us to the www.xakep.ru forum where a poster claims that the worldwide Skype crash was caused by Russian hackers (in Russian). The claim is that they found a local buffer overflow vulnerability caused by sending a long string to the Skype authorization server. You can try Google's beta Russian-to-English translation, but the interesting part is the exploit code, and that's more readable in the original. The Washington Post reports that Skype has denied this rumor.

4 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. Look by TheRealMindChild · · Score: 3, Interesting

    strncpy

    --

    "When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
  2. They hired DoS specialists against their own users by rpp3po · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Skype's login servers usually don't carry much load compared to the mass of traffic routed directly between all nodes via P2P. My guess is they just got overrun because they were not prepared for the worst case: ALL clients trying to connect AT THE SAME TIME to their master. I bet Slashdot wouldn't be prepared for all of its users connecting at the same time, either. But it needs not to. It is never going to happen (why should it? - well how about December 1st, 1AM UTC everybody?). With Skype it's different. They should have been prepared for the case, that whenever their network would be down for whatever reason all clients would try to connect concurrently! Obviously they weren't prepared. If you watched the aftermath closely you could see that they started filtering by IP on day two. Only a certain number of clients were allowed to connect per IP range. They probably hired super expensive DoS emergency contractors to get this back up. A hack is still possible, but I rather guess that it brought the network down, but did not keep it from coming back up. That was Skype's own fault.

  3. Skype has to change for eavesdropping law by Burz · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It probably has more to do with Skype retooling for eavesdropping requirements under the new wiretap law. Skype handles a lot of international traffic, encrypted and often in a P2P fashion, so a major change is necessary in order to comply.

    From what little I know about Skype, the network can cause both parties in a Skype-Skype call to route through a third party, a supernode (this is done to defeat firewall complications). So perhaps they would be able to start routing all USA-international traffic through in-house supernodes where the stream could be tapped. (Anyone want to correct me? Clarify?)

  4. What really happened !!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It wouldn't surprise me to learn that Skype shut down their OWN servers at the request of
    a "big Brother" agency, for the purpose of installing "Big Brother" software on both the
    server(s) and eventually the clients (because now a trojan is installed) into everyone's
    system with a "knock knock" protocol that would activate a "wiretap" to capture your
    voice, images, and text. That's why we had to DL that "new copy" they wanted us to have.

    Now I know you folks think I'm full if shit... I hope the heck I am but there is now
    something the "skype hackers" can check out to see if it's really true. I suppose a really
    good reverse engineering effort would find something like that.

    Why would the Russkies want to mess up Skype, they use it more then anyone else.