February 2006

Yep, I got one too: An officious e-mail that starts off by saying, “We regret to inform you that your online profile was not successfully updated and your Skype account has been temporarily suspended…,” blah, blah, blah. Of course, the e-mail is a phish. It didn’t originate from Skype.

If you haven’t been keeping up with the terminology recently, phishing attacks are attempts to get consumers to reveal account details or personal information about themselves. The attacks use all sorts of methods, including ‘spoofed’ e-mails and fake websites that often look identical to the real ones. Some attacks go further, by enticing the unwitting user into installing malware such as keystroke loggers onto their computers.

Continue reading "Tuna phish" »

Hi, I’m Kurt Sauer, Skype’s CSO. Over the coming weeks, I’d like to talk about some of the different security features in Skype and where we’re going with them. This month (February 2006) marks my second year here, which, in Skype-years, is nearly an eternity. Over that time, we’ve been able to put on the street one of the largest functional PKI-based communications systems in the world, so I thought that talking about PKIs would be a good starting point.

While I suppose it isn’t the most glamorous piece of our products, the Skype PKI (public key infrastructure) is an important component of what makes Skype work. Last year, Brad Templeton described Skype’s PKI as a ZUI (Zero User Interface) system. (I liked the way he put it so much that I still have the original article bookmarked.)

Continue reading "ZUI and the Skype PKI" »