Skype is now proud of its millions of online subscribers. At the same, those Trojan makers are becoming more interested at Skype too. It’s a news at NetworkAsia by: Network World Asia Staff
During this trip to Raleigh, NC, I bought some credit at Skype so that I can call China using the free Internet at the Hotel. The quality of SkypeOut is very impressively good, while the price is just 0.17c. Skype has been an International carrier, without nation barriers, even to China.
Another Trojan horse is spreading through the Internet telephone network of Skype Ltd.
The malicious code, known as both Warezov and Stration, is similar to an earlier version detected in February, but with a new URL (uniform resource locator) and a new version of the malicious code, according to an alert posted Thursday by Websense Inc.
Websense warns Skype users to watch for the message “Check up this,” with a URL containing a hyperlink.
The code itself isn’t self-propogating but when it runs, the URL is sent to everyone on the user’s contact list.
When users click on the link, they are redirected to a site that is hosting a file named file_01.exe. Users are then prompted to run the file and if they do, several other files are downloaded and run. The downloaded files are other versions of the Waresov/Stration malicious code.
Once the Trojan is installed in a system, it tries to connect to a Yahoo Inc. mail server to send an SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) message.
However, that server doesn’t appear to be operating, according to Websense.
Skype, a division of eBay Inc., offers a number of Internet-based services, including VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) and instant messaging.
It’s a good site on “Telecom Terminology”. I found it when I search “TFN” at google.com. Hope it help you also. Check it out.
During these days, I am struggling to find an answer for myself – Will VoIP really help enterprises save money?
In the industry, VoIP is almost a “must” for newly deployed voice systems, particularly for long distance calls. The reason to do so seems to be obvious – VoIP helps save money. After checking the data on WAN costs and the cost saved with VoIP, I find it’s very difficult for me to convince myself. The data comes from my direct data from real world and some other reference data from a huge MNC told me the same story.
If you use dedicated leased lines to carry VoIP, it’s not cost-saving, while VoIP over Internet saves money.
In fact, during an open discussion, consultants from a very famous VoIP vendor admitted this judgement. But they insisted that VoIP/IP Telephony will help improve productivity, by short numbers, enterprise announcement, and etc. However, productivity is very difficult to measure, isn’t it? Of course, the last reason to deploy VoIP/IPT devices is to protect investment. 
This is another difficult-to-measure reason.
By accident, I found this old article by Tim Hills which discussed VoIP vs PSTN very interestingly. Here is some of its contents:
Why Bother With VOIP?
It’s NOT about old wine in new bottles
VOIP Risks
VOIP + IP/MPLS works – but how well?
VOIP Reliability
Failures will happen – will new technologies help?
Management Challenges
IP/MPLS management is at last coming up to speed for voice needs
Improving VOIP QOS
Carriers are learning to reimplement the past to improve VOIP QOS
We must admit that Jobs is a genius, not only in technology sense, but also at business marketing sense. When Jobs returned to a languishing Apple in 1997 after his 1985 ouster, Apple has been getting rebirth at all. Most of young people are just talking Apple’s innovative products, buying them and taking them as a fashion.
USAToday has a very good article to outline the secrets behind Jobs’ success in
- 1 Make innovative products
- 2 Keep in simple
- 3 Create truly memorable ads
- 4 Find an enemy
- 5 Work the taste-makers
- 6 Offer surprises
- 7 Put on a show
Read more…
The question seems to have very straight forward answer. Access routers, firewalls, security proxies, and optional intrusion detection systems (IDS) or intrusion prevention systems (IPS) and DMZ … That’s enough? For a small to medium size enterprise, maybe yes. However, for a MNC with tens of offices worldwide, the thing becomes much more complicated.
Generally speaking, almost every security manager or IT manager agree that Internet interfaces are one of most important security threat sources. Every Internet interface means money to protect them. In the orther hand, in CIO’s notebook, there has always been one strategy to make use of cheap and reliable Internet when possible. Local Internet access means lower WAN cost.
That’s something complex that need your balancing between security risk and protection cost and WAN cost. See diagram. A easy answer you’d better permit Internet for most of sites where the Internet is cheap and reliable, while choose different security safeguards at the Internet border and VPN borders. Back to your real world, that’s up to you, my friend.
Tonight Dan summarized one new offering by Skype – SkypePrime, a creative fee-based voice service. That’s means
everybody can create a voice information service with Skype, becoming a VISP (Voice Information Service Provider). Then you can try to list your services at some directory or indexing services. Potentially this might be an evolvement model of booming podcasting at Internet. At the same time, this kind of service might give birth to some kind of sex/porn calls.
Dan York’s blog is very attractive. I often find his novel ideas and discovery about VoIP and security related there. Please check out his personal blog at: disruptivetelephony. If you wang to know more about him, check this link.
Almost every enterprise IT security managers are facing the same problems: how to control the internet? how to implement the granular security policy at the perimeter ? When you dig the Internet, you must find a bunch of discussions and threads, among which the discussions and debates between Thomas and Antishinder are quite interesting.
The assertions by Bluecoat is as the following:
- The ISA firewall cannot be as secure as Blue Coat proxies because it runs on a general purpose server that has ongoing security vulnerabilities
- The ISA firewall is unable to inspect traffic inside an SSL tunnel
- The ISA firewall is unable to inspect and manage peer-to-peer, instant messaging and multimedia connections
- The ISA firewall has limited support for granular access control
- The ISA firewall’s network performance is inferior to Blue Coat’s proxy performance
The fight back from Thomas is very strong. Personally speaking, I think the origin of this debate depends on your attitude of hardware or software security devices. The former will help lower the installation and operation cost, while the latter has lower price. So if your enterprise is very lucky to be mature on server operations, the software proxy solution is as good as, or better than the hardware solution.
More and more colleagues start to use Skype to talk with their family when they are in business trip, enjoying free oversea communications with earphones. No doubt, I do the same way. Why not? Do you like to pay those telecom companies at around tens of cents per minutes while you can talk freely? That’s the right reason why Skype has been growing so fast.
When I checked their newest version at their website tonight, I found a beta version 3.1 with an interesting feature, SkypeFind. That’s something like a business bulletin, but with a unprecedented large number of subscribers. The current beta version is 3.1.0.112, while the latest stable version is 3.0.0.218.
At the new version, unyte is a built-in feature, which enables friends share desktop and applications remotely. Another new feature – Shared Sketch Pad is very interesting too.
[Tags]Skype,Web2.0[/Tags]
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