1y ago

Hackers Can Silently Grab Your IP Through Skype. Microsoft Is In No Rush to Fix It

www.404media.co Hackers Can Silently Grab Your IP Through Skype. Microsoft Is In No Rush to Fix It

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.

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1y ago

Hackers can get your IP through Skype by just sending a link, no click required

www.404media.co /hackers-find-your-skype-ip-address-microsoft-wont-fix/

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58 comments

People still use Skype?
- You just hurt the feelings of 5 internet users
  
  And mine.
- People still use Skype?
  Relevant parody
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=ZI0w_pwZY3E
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
  
  How have I missed that 🤣
  
  Lol!!

The attack could pose a serious risk to activists, political dissidents, journalists, those targeted by cybercriminals, and many more people.
Lmao like they're using Skype when trying to hide
- Hello. I am evil hacker cyber criminal.
  If you want to discuss terms, find me on Skype at EvilHackerCyberCriminalGuy69.
  Do not be fooled by the 69, as while it can be seen as a joke, it is my birth year as the original name was taken.
  Thank you.
  
  I use 88 in stuff as well. I didn't realize until way to late that 88 is a nazi thing.
- Have to be honest, I thought Skype was discontinued years ago.
  
  It was but we forgot to tell our grandparents, and Microsoft
  
  somehow Emperor Skype returned
  no matter how many times you say no it keeps coming back, same with Edge
  
  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?
- 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.

Ohh no, someone on the Internet might have my IP address! The horror! What if they try to ping me?!
- People used to use this attack in League of Legends a decade ago. If they're losing, they guess someone might have Skype open; and moreover, that their Skype is the same as their summoner name. Then they get an ip address and ddos the entire lobby, causing the game to crash (I think it happened in one of my games maybe once, but I didn't really play ranked other than team ranked).
  Also, since all pro & semipro players had each other added, this was possible to do at any time during online tournaments (which was most tournaments - TSM invitational etc). So there were always rules that ddossing was disallowed. But it did happen.
  Known ddossers were more hated in the community than known flamers, but a few people who did it "reformed" and went on to be pro players anyway.
- What if they leave an anonymous tip that you're distributing CSAM?
  
  With just an IP? Then the system is broken. Because an IP is often easy to get, and everything that directly connects to you needs your IP, unless you use a VPN I guess.
  Every website knows your IP. Every internet application knows your IP. Everyone in a peer-to-to-peer network knows your IP. It's not a secret, it's just your internet address. It is designed to be known.

Is this even news? Literally an exploit as old as time.
- I remember my friends and I doing this in 2008. This really is super old

When Skype was still in common use, this was a very known issue. I’m in lots of gaming communities, and you had to be careful about who knew your username because you could have your IP exposed then get DDoS.
Possibly they patched it and this is a new instance of this, but it was like this for years and years before.

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
- nice

If you connect to anything on the internet, you're giving out your IP address. Why would this be any more of a concern?
- Users may consent to giving Microsoft their IP address but not to everyone who sends them a link
- Because this can happen without you connecting to any suspicious server.
  
  At this point Microsoft is a suspicious server, and any data they could get from this they could just like... pay for from one of our overlords

Now, that's a name I've not heard in a long time.

This is not new. It's literally always been like this.
- 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.

What the fuck. What percentage of people uses skype? I'd really rather see coverage of the exploits found in discord, zoom, slack, etc.

This is soo old that's how they would ddos clan leaders and shot callers back in the acheage days

Man, Justin Bieber is such a fa-- wait. We aren't in the 00's anymore?

Who is using Skype these days!
- 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.
- Still a thing for some enterprise users... and the elderly.

Silently? They don’t even tell you they’re doing it? 😕

There ia Very Probably No solution to this

Always on VPN is a good idea, or a VPN just for apps you don't trust (like skype). https://github.com/Safing/portmaster is a nice visual firewall configurator that can do things like, this app, must use the firewall. (easy to configure split firewall)

Me who hasn’t used Skype in like 15 years: Oh no

Because nobody cares. At all. The only people who might are streamers and over zealous nerds.
- Even an overzealous nerd would understand knowing an IP address is pretty much worthless.
  
  You underestimate how much privacy advocates bitch over the dumbest shit ensuring that nobody ever actually listens when it's important.

Is anyone still using Skype? Or is this a danger just to the last 10 people using it?

Pretty sure this was already known. Just even back when Skype was relevant it wasn't fixed.

They only fix bugs that otherwise would impact their earnings.

Huh, the time machine must be off. This was news from a decade ago.
It's actually one of the main reasons we switched off Skype to Discord for most gaming socialization.

How exactly would you stop this on a peer to peer app exactly, wouldn't you have to route traffic through a centralized proxy?

58 comments