Malicious Ads In Skype – Here’s What To Look For

As if the folks at Skype weren’t already busy enough with their April 14th launch of Skype for Business Online (which has replaced Microsoft’s Lync, which replaced Microsoft Office Communicator), their recent update to personal Skype accounts incorporated a few changes.

Back in January, some Skype users reported a banner ad that contained a link to malicious software. It appeared under the guise of being a Flash, Java, or QuickTime dialog box that informed the user their software was out of date. Unfortunately, clicking the box initiated an installer instead of legitimate software updates. Those issues have since been taken care of, but users should be mindful of banner ads in Skype and look out for the tell-tale signs that something isn’t right, such as strangely constructed sentences, misspellings, or a general unprofessional tone. Hopefully, Skype’s request that users use a Fiddler trace in order to track the web resources accessed when the ads opened helped them figure out if a Skype ad was actually causing the problem or not, as well as how the malicious ads were sneaking in.

The new update this week adds support for Hindi and the option to disable special text formatting for sent chat messages, both of which will improve the user experience for those customers utilizing the chat box for messaging.

Click HERE to head over to the latest Skype updates from FileHippo.