Researchers: Skype May Whack Your Network

Running Skype on a business network can cause big-time security woes, say a pair of French researchers. At this month's BlackHat Europe security conference, they released a 98-page paper that warned, among other things, that with Skype it is "impossible to scan for trojan/backdoor/malware." They report plenty of other problems as well. Their conclusions are the most frightening. They claim it is "hard to enforce a security policy with Skype."

They say Skype is "incompatible with traffic monitoring, IDS."

And they say of it, "Total blackbox. Lack of transparency. No way to know if there is/will be a backdoor."

Scary stuff. There's no other confirmation of this, so it's tough to know whether it's true.

For individual consumers, this isn't that big an issue. But network administrators would do well to check the security issues thoroughly if they have Skype users on their network.