Tell HN: Microsoft Skype Security Is Flawed • Hacker News Board

Re: Tell HN: Microsoft Skype Security Is Flawed

#41

Post by lern_too_spel » Wed, May 13, 2020, 4:41 PM UTC

fsflover wrote: post #19

dragonshed wrote: post #17

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...

Or for another reason: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18411779

Snowden's leaks showed that Skype allowed governments to wiretap its video calls since at least 2010, when those wiretaps were ingested into PRISM. That is before the Microsoft acquisition.

It amazes me that people parrot this conspiracy theory without doing 5 minutes of Google searching first before making themselves look silly.

Re: Tell HN: Microsoft Skype Security Is Flawed

#42

Post by stephenr » Wed, May 13, 2020, 10:51 PM UTC

rlpb wrote: post #38

aksss wrote: post #31

Anyone using [insert service here] should be using MFA of some sort. This would solve so many of these problems. It does sound like OP is being hit by a phishing attack, but assuming it's not that, this can only be a lesson for everyone to turn on MFA now if you haven't already. Yes, MS' consumer platform (live, hotmail, outlook, etc) supports it.

Without widespread U2F support, the list of individual MFA secrets I would have to maintain would be unmanageable. It's not yet reasonable to expect users to have MFA on all of their accounts; only their most important ones.

I have MFA setup for 29 things, and I don’t really see how adding another 229 would make it any less usable.

It’s arguable that something like u2f is more secure but with a good TOTP app usability is not the problem.

Re: Tell HN: Microsoft Skype Security Is Flawed

#43

Post by easytiger » Thu, May 14, 2020, 1:54 AM UTC

colmmacc wrote: post #24

superkuh wrote: post #13

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…

Skype's founders are Danish and Swedish, and the business had offices in London, Luxembourg, Estonia (well that's Blue Moon, where the p2p was developed) and more. 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 suffe…

My understanding, potentially flawed, was that the eBay purchase was so poorly overseen, that eBay didn't buy the Skype IP itself, retained in another company thus giving a neutered failure of a deal