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Did Russian Hackers Crash Skype?
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.
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.