Cyber-crime gang boasts of bringing down Skype on Twitter

If you’ve had problems connecting to Skype recently it could well be the result of the latest attack launched by the ‘CyberTeam’ gang. This group of cyber-criminals have been boasting on Twitter, under the hashtag #SkypeDown, of crashing the Microsoft video chat platform.

The system has been down for hours

For several hours the video chat system crashed around the world due to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. When accessing Skype, the program fails to start the session, no matter how many times the user tries to restart the application.

“Even though the consequences have been annoying for many users, their privacy and details of bank accounts used to pay for Skype services have not necessarily been compromised,” explains Hervé Lambert, Retail Global Operations Manager at Panda Security.

Skype has announced via Twitter that the problem was resolved early on Monday June 20, and has thanked users for their patience.

What is a DDoS attack?

DDoS are among the most powerful cyber-attacks that companies face today, as hackers use them to crash corporate servers rendering services unusable until the attack is remedied.

Such attacks manage to get thousands of devices of all types – computers, smartphones, and even appliances connected to the Internet of Things- to send vast quantities of unusable data to the victim’s servers. As such, they saturate the victim’s bandwidth ensuring that the computers cannot process more requests.

DDoS attacks have become a recurrent threat nowadays, as exemplified in the massive attack in October 2016 that affected major global firms such as Netflix, Twitter, Amazon, or The New York Times.

In this case, service was interrupted for almost 11 hours, affecting more than a billion users around the world.