China monitoring Skype messages
Researchers in Canada have discovered that Skype’s Chinese venture with Tom Online, called Tom-Skype, is filtering text chats and monitoring them. Chats are routinely scanned for politically censored keywords. If any are found, those chats and personal information are stored on insecure and publiclly accessible servers. They are encrypted, but the key needed to decrypt them is stored right alongside them!
Their report, called “Breaching Trust: An analysis of surveillance and security practices on China’s Tom-Skype platform,“ stops short of implicating the Chinese government, but does suggest that Tom-Skype is cooperating with them. The filter appears to scan for usernames and certain keywords relating to Taiwan independence, the Falun Gong, and any political opposition of the government.
Censorship is nothing new in China. The government has been controlling the media for years, and when the Internet arrived they promptly began controlling that, too. This caused some outrage from journalists covering the Beijing Olympics, and resulted in the government relaxing their control slightly.
Skype released a statement saying the security breach had been fixed but did not comment on the filter issue itself. However, in 2006 they did issue a statement about the filters, citing Chinese government regulations as the reason for them. Tom Group could not be reached for comment.
Read[PCWorld]
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Not that surprising…China’s always been that way about censorship, and Skype is not as secured as it is advertised (you may find some great articles about how to hide a botnet within Skype if you search google a bit ;) )
on October 2, 2008 at 04:03 PM - LINKIt’s important to reaffirm that the issues highlighted in the ‘Breaching Trust’ report affect only the TOM-Skype software distributed by TOM in China. Standard versions of Skype remain unaffected.
Josh Silverman, Skype’s President, has posted answers to some common questions about the privacy breach, which might help clarify things.
on October 9, 2008 at 05:26 AM - LINK