New York – Users of the internet telephone service Skype are being advised to be cautious after the source code of a, so called, Trojan horse has been made available to the public. The Trojan is said to record telephone calls and sending the recordings to hackers.
Join our WhatsApp groupSubscribe to our Daily Roundup Email
A Trojan is a computer programme that tricks users to download it by pretending to be of use while really causing damage when installed on the computer.
The Trojan often gets into the computer through its e-mail service, where the user is urged to click on a link or download freeware. When installed, this particular Trojan will then record calls and send the audio files as mp3 files to the waiting hacker.
“What is mostly threatened here is personal integrity – but depending on who is making the call it may be really interesting stuff that they get hold of,” said Cecilia Lundin, head of communications at computer security company Symantec, to Swedish news agency TT.
The company does not know how many are already hit by the Trojan, or how many could potentially be hit, but they have estimated the threat as fairly mild as the Trojan is not designed for mass distribution.
“We are advising people to be cautious. Users shouldn’t click on any suspicious looking links in their e-mails and it may be prudent to update the anti-virus programmes already installed, “Lundin said to TT.
Skype was initially founded by Swedish entrepreneur Niklas Zennström and the Danish Janus Friis. When the duo sold the company to American e-bay in 2005, Zennström became one of Sweden’s richest citizens.
The Trojan code referred to here is merely a proof of concept. There are no instances of it being used maliciously by the normal anti-virus/malware reporting sources. What you should remember is that what this probably is doing is taking advantage of the normal decryption that takes place when the packets arrive at the destination PC over the network, and just inserting code in that takes the decoded audio before it gets to the audio playback device – this is the same sort of thing that’s used for any number of applications, such as recording music on a PC. I wouldn’t particularly be paranoid about this.