The publicity-minded Syrian Electronic Army on Wednesday targeted the public faces of Skype, posting anti-surveillance messages to the video-chat service’s blog and to its Twitter and Facebook accounts.
On Skype’s Twitter account, for instance, this message appeared: “Stop spying on people! via Syrian Electronic Army.” That tweet, noted quickly by The Next Web, was removed within an hour, but a record of it lingered a bit longer on Skype’s Web site.
The Skype blog carried a similar headline: “Hacked by Syrian Electronic Army.. Stop Spying!
Like other widely used Internet communications services, Microsoft-owned Skype has been swept up in the surveillance controversy unleashed in mid-2013 by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Leaked slides from the U.S. National Security Agency reportedly have revealed that Skype has installed a “back door” that enables monitoring by governments of Skype video and audio calls, and officials in Luxembourg, where Skype is based, are said to be investigating whether Skype has shared information on its Luxembourgian users with the NSA.
Charges of back doors and cooperation with government spying efforts have also been leveled at Microsoft as a whole, along with other Internet heavyweights including Yahoo, Facebook, and Apple.
Over at Facebook on Wednesday, the Skype account featured a broader message from the Syrian Electronic Army about Microsoft’s communications services: “Don’t use Microsoft emails (hotmail,outlook), They are monitoring your accounts and selling it to the governments. More details soon. #SEA.” That post, too, was quickly deleted.
Skype responded later in the day stating: “We recently became aware of a targeted cyber attack that led to access to Skype’s social media properties, but these credentials were quickly reset,” a spokesperson for Skype said in an email message to website cnet.com. “No user information was compromised.”
source: cnet.com
