A New Vulnerability found in skype by NYU-Poly and France’s INRIA that allows to anyone to hack into skype and get your IP address,even a noob can do this.
Even if you are not signedin in skype , Still hacker can get your IP address. With IP address, an attacker can get track your location or get access to your system with Open port.
“The Skype privacy settings fail to protect against our scheme,” the study reports.
In order to do the research, Team of Researchers successfully tracked 10,000 randomly chosen Skype users and launched an attack on those users to get their IP address.
First they successfully retrieved a large number of Skype IDs along with personal information from Skype itself. Then these IDs were called on an hourly basis.
Researchers were able to get the IP addresses by blocking some packets of information that are sent to the Internet. In doing that, they then set up a direct communication between the users’ computers and theirs and then were able to access their IP address, explains Ross.
This technique illustrates how vulnerable people using Skype could be to an attack and potential blackmail, especially if they are somewhere they shouldn’t be, Ross said.
The study found thousands of people at a time could be tracked without much trouble.
Using this vulnerability an attacker can do any cyber crime.
“It’s bad if you’re concerned about your privacy,” said Ross. “A parent could track their children, or a spouse could track the location of his or her spouse. An employer could track all his employees.”
Other real-time voice communication systems are also vulnerable, but don’t have as “serious” a problem as Skype, said Ross.
Those other systems are vulnerable to attacks, but users can actually see that someone unknown is calling them. This isn’t the case in Skype, Ross said.
More than a year ago, Ross and his team reported to skype about this vulnerability but there is no response from their side.
Adrian Asher, Skype's chief information security officer, said that IP addresses are easily uncovered in most web communications clients."Just as with typical Internet communications software, Skype users who are connected may be able to determine each other's IP addresses. Through research and development, we will continue to make advances in this area and improvements to our software," he told.
