Skypekiller sounds ridiculous
There have been a lot of discussions and even debate on whether or not enterprises should permit Skype. The focus point here is its security issues. I list out ten security concerns to Skype before. However, it’s indeed of value. It can help lower the voice communication cost and very convenient. There are more and more value-added service on it. Anyway, nobody can oversee the existence of hundreds of millions subscribers of Skype. It means business opportunity to many startups and technical geeks. They are proud of their hacking and breaking-into of Skype.
About a year ago, a china-based team reported they have succeeded to unveil the protocols of Skype so that they can duplicate their own Skype client and insert them into Skypenet. After that report, some experts expressed their doubt on its authenticity because Skype protocol seems unbreakable.
Following that report, a few company claimed their IM/P2P gateway and filters can handle Skype, such as Facetime, Bluecoat, IMlogic, and etc. Further, some specific products were released to kill Skype. Skypekiller is one of them. You can check out the detailed functions from their website. They claim they can remove/uninstall all Skype from the enterprise network. Indeed, it’s some kind of desktop management software. It needs to install its agent for all desktops at the enterprise network and scan all of them. Then it will remove all skype related registry entries and softwares when finding them. Based on its working style, it’s just a specific purpose LANDesk or something like that. It’s really a Skypekiller. But for large enterprises, what means to them? next one should be BT killer, eMule killer ? It sounds ridiculous. For SMBs, they just likes to use Skype to cut their voice bill.
Hi, Francois,
Appreciate your detailed introduction. Got it. It’s RemoteExec that supports all the base functions of Skypekiller. Skypekiller is just a simple wrapper and demo for your real sword – RemoteExec. From your introduction, RemoteExec is a very strong middleware for other vendors to build their own software on it. It can be used as a command and control platform.
When I have time, I will have somebody to try it out.
Regards,
Richard
Dear Richard,
SkypeKiller is a freeware based on the technology of RemoteExec, one of our commercial software (http://www.remoteexec.com).
RemoteExec is a universal deployer for Microsoft Windows systems, that allows network administrators to remotely install from a desktop, all application and file types on the servers and workstations, throughout their network.
RemoteExec (and therefore SkypeKiller) is extremely simple to use and doesn’t require any kind of deployment. Only a few minutes are necessary to get your first action launched:
- Install RemoteExec on any workstation or server connected to your network (Time estimate: less than 2 minutes)
- Select the or thee action(s) to execute (hotfix deployment, script execution, system reboot, etc…)
- Define target computer criteria (workstations only, systems running XP SP2, etc…)
- Select the target computer zone (the whole domain, organization unit(s), specific list of computers, etc…)
- Click to start the job (a progress window is displayed, followed by the status report detailing the success/failure of each action)
If necessary, you can even schedule subsequent automatic passes for computers unavailable during the initial pass (unconnected laptops, powered down computers, etc…)
You can freely download a fully-functional trial version of RemoteExec from our Web site: please check it out!
Best regards,
François Amigorena
IS Decisions
President & CEO
Thanks for your comment. Totally I agree to your points. It’s a software that customers can use it to detect and remove Skype from their LAN. My points are from technically perspective, it seems to be of no value. Because I am in charge of a large enterprise IT, it’s incredible for me to deploy such kind of tool specificly for Skype.
I don’t want to hurt your company and your team. If you feel so, I apologize.
Would you please explain a little bit on how to work as agentless ? From your website, I think Skypekiller needs to install agents..
Dear Richard,
I am François Amigorena, IS Decisions’ CEO, SkypeKiller’s editor.
I do feel really sorry that you find SkypeKiller “ridiculous”.
Our aim is to give our corporate clients maximum choice in their network management.
If they want to allow the use of Skype on their networks, it is perfectly alright with us. But if they don’t, we provide them with an efficient tool to perform a clean and remote uninstall.
More, SkypeKiller can also be used just to detect Skype instances without uninstalling them or only partially.
And by the way, SkypeKiller is a totally agentless solution…
Best regards,
François Amigorena
IS Decisions
President & CEO