For more than the last 24 hours, millions of Skype users have been unable to use the popular VoIP service, although for some users the issue has been resolved Friday morning. eBay attributes the outage to a problem in a Skype networking algorithm while rumours suggest that code posted anonymously to a Russian security discussion forum could be used to knock the service offline in a Denial of Service attack. eBay's Villu Arak emphasized that "
neither Wednesday's planned maintenance of our Web-based payment services nor any form of attack was related to the current sign-on issues in any way."
The code in question is designed to repeatedly launch Skype and overwhelm the server with information, said Andrew Storms, director of security operations with nCircle Network Security. "
But I couldn't say if it would have this kind of potential DOS effect on all of Skype." The code simply would not work as advertised, said Stefano Zanero, CTO with Secure Network SRL. "The
attack code is fake, no doubt on that. I don't think this is the cause of whatever is happening to Skype."
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