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I lost my Twilio account yesterday through the same method - haven't heard back and I've been wondering if I'm not the only one.
> Both emails encouraged me to contact customer support. I did so only to be met with a request to fill out an online form with an incredible amount of personal information to verify the account. Why would I provide 10X the personal info (...)? This by itself looks like a phishing attack. Did you click a link to Skype support in the second email message or find it by yourself going to the Skype website and browsing a…
So, maybe it could be legit.
Skype security has been flawed ever since that series of odd buyout events that led to the sudden removal of end-to-end encrypted peer to peer operation. First eBay bought what they thought was Skype but instead was only the license to the branding and users and not the p2p backend tech the swiss guys still owned. Then Microsoft stepped in out of nowhere to take the useless brand from eBay and the actual backend only…
I'm not sure how much diligence Ebay ever did on their purchase of Skype, but it never seemed to me like they had a credible business plan for what to do with it. Something something about integrating with sellers. Felt more like the leadership there suffered from some Bay Area strategic acquisition envy. I remember being on painful calls with Ebay and Skype engineering who had very different ideas of how infrastructure should be deployed.
Anyway, Ebay spun off Skype (at a loss) to private equity ... not to MS. Skype floated around in PE for a few years before the (enormous) MS purchase. MS promptly put Skype in an advertising division of all places. I've heard rumors that the DoJ encouraged MS to make the acquisition ... to get Skype calls in the hands of an entity that would be more favorable to lawful interception requests. MS certainly has a painful history with the DoJ, but I really don't know if it's credible or not.
Skype security has been flawed ever since that series of odd buyout events that led to the sudden removal of end-to-end encrypted peer to peer operation. First eBay bought what they thought was Skype but instead was only the license to the branding and users and not the p2p backend tech the swiss guys still owned. Then Microsoft stepped in out of nowhere to take the useless brand from eBay and the actual backend only…
They gradually removed[0] the peer to peer operation because it sucked - quality was bad, calls dropped, outages, bad mobile support. [0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/05/skype...
Skype security has been flawed ever since that series of odd buyout events that led to the sudden removal of end-to-end encrypted peer to peer operation. First eBay bought what they thought was Skype but instead was only the license to the branding and users and not the p2p backend tech the swiss guys still owned. Then Microsoft stepped in out of nowhere to take the useless brand from eBay and the actual backend only…
They gradually removed[0] the peer to peer operation because it sucked - quality was bad, calls dropped, outages, bad mobile support. [0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/05/skype...
Skype security has been flawed ever since that series of odd buyout events that led to the sudden removal of end-to-end encrypted peer to peer operation. First eBay bought what they thought was Skype but instead was only the license to the branding and users and not the p2p backend tech the swiss guys still owned. Then Microsoft stepped in out of nowhere to take the useless brand from eBay and the actual backend only…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They gradually removed[0] the peer to peer operation because it sucked - quality was bad, calls dropped, outages, bad mobile support. [0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/05/skype...
And it meant that random users' computers were being drafted into running a supernode and relaying traffic for other users, without permission or even any notice. Not only did this consume CPU time and bandwidth on the affected users' computers, but it also put anyone running a supernode in a position to observe and tamper with network traffic between other users.
This is most probably a phishing attack.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And it meant that random users' computers were being drafted into running a supernode and relaying traffic for other users, without permission or even any notice. Not only did this consume CPU time and bandwidth on the affected users' computers, but it also put anyone running a supernode in a position to observe and tamper with network traffic between other users.
Isn't that the point of having end-to-end encryption? I know Skype doesn't have that but perhaps that would have been a different solution
https://www.cs.jhu.edu/~cwright/oakland08.pdf
Besides, end-to-end encryption doesn't do anything to allay concerns about abuse of users' resources.