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Microsoft Reads Your Skype Chat Messages
An anonymous reader writes "A Microsoft server accesses URLs sent in Skype chat messages, even if they are HTTPS URLs and contain account information. A reader of Heise publications notified Heise Security (link to German website, Google translation). They replicated the observation by sending links via Skype, including one to a private file storage account, and found that these URLs are shortly after accessed from a Microsoft IP address. When confronted, Microsoft claimed that this is part of an effort to detect and filter spam and phishing URLs."
"New Skype malware spreading at 2,000 clicks per hour to mine Bitcoins"
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/04/05/new-skype-malware-spreading-at-2000-clicks-per-hour-makes-money-by-using-victims-machines-to-mine-bitcoins/
And they try to prevent it by detecting malware and we get headlines like this. Looks like people are on a witch hunt here.
Alternate headline: Microsoft protects hundreds of millions of Skype users by going to the effort of checking even https URLs in chat for malware and spam
This space for rent.
AOL reads your messages. Google reads your messages. Facebook reads your messages. Apple reads your messages. Microsoft reads your messages.
How is this news? The price for free IM is that they read your messages and sell the info they gather to advertisers.
Is anybody else suddenly feeling a sense of curiosity about what sorts of vulnerabilities, if any, the program that Microsoft probes URLs sent over skype with may possess?
If TFA is accurate, you can make whatever software this is visit a URL just by skype-chatting it to somebody. What sort of security measures would they have in place for systems whose job it is to poke every last probably-malware link that goes across skype?
So, as I fully expected, this whole campaign about users being "Scroogled" that Microsoft has been involved in is misdirection, and they do the same thing.
Wanna bet they also scrape your hotmail and everything else in the same way they accuse Google of doing?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Both Facebook and Google's chats use bog standard XMPP (aka Jabber). Normal, clueless people use Facebook to chat. The few that don't use Facebook use the chat inside Gmail, or the one installed on their smartphone. Encryption over XMPP is very common; You'd need to use a non-standard client (say, Pidgin), but it's feasible.
The major problem is that encryption requires support at both ends:
Even a totally proprietary chat network(if it's been cracked open far enough that 3rd party clients exist, or 3rd-party wrappers around the first party client or libraries exist) can be used to send encrypted payloads; but only if both users are set up for that(Pidgin with OTR, say, works just fine over AOL's 'Oscar' protocol; but only if both ends are using it. This is the real killer. If you don't have control over what your clueless compatriot is using, none of the client-side encryption options are going to help you much. Not supported in Google's gmail web app window thing? No deal. Not supported by cellphone's default chat client? no deal.
You'll still probably get SSL, from all but the shittiest chat services; but that only protects you from people watching the wire, not from the service provider(who is the man in the middle, with one SSL-protected connection to you and a second to your chat compatriot).
Same with email: it's less common than it used to be for email to go between the client and the mailserver in the clear; but it's still damn rare for messages to be encrypted at the client end and thus safe from the mailserver operator.
https://www.eff.org/who-has-your-back-2013
Microsoft is extremely hypocritical in their claims of privacy protection, and their attacks on Google.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Hopefully MS does some dupe checking on their end, otherwise this could amount to a DoS attack. Imagine spamming out the victim's URL to hundreds of thousands of Skype users and then MS flooding that URL with requests.
How would you even propose they filter spam links without a basic request? Do they blacklist all URL shorteners, or do you just let all spam that uses URL shorteners to go through?
I do not like to defend Microsoft, but I can see this as being the case. Skype's got quite a bit of problems with Messenger Spam, this may be a mechanism to review them.
By the way, if privacy is your problem, you're not fixing it by using someone else's infrustructure. You should expect, by default, that they're going through your information. Build your own server or forever hold your peace.
Not if both sides use the OTR plugin that comes with Pidgin.