Thanks, Raymond,

 

There is nobody else within an eight of a mile and the wifi barely reaches
across the house.  

 

The stuff on my computer is standard office stuff.  The only unusual program
I have is the music program finale.  

 

Does uninstalling Skype really get rid of it.  It had become a really pushy
program and it fought of uninstallation for a bit.  

 

When I get back to Santa Fe, I think I am going to wipe the hard disk and
start again.  Try to limp along until then. 

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/>
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Parks, Raymond
Sent: Friday, September 06, 2013 7:30 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Urgent: skype vulnerability?

 

I did a quick search through my data and there haven't been any major Skype
vulns in a while.  There's a local privilege escalation from this last
spring and URL snooping, but neither should result in massive Skype usage.
The Dark Comet Remote Access Tool (RAT) uses the Skype port and protocol to
"phone home", so you might have a pest problem.  Even worse, a vulnerability
was published last fall for getting in to the Dark Comet RAT via it's use of
Skype - so if you have Dark Comet, someone could be breaking it to get into
your computer. 

 

I'd do an off-line, boot from CD/DVD, virus scan with your anti-virus of
choice.

 

The Jet Pack provides a wireless access point - could someone be
piggybacking on that?  What's your WiFi security?

 

Ray Parks

Consilient Heuristician/IDART Program Manager

V: 505-844-4024  M: 505-238-9359  P: 505-951-6084

NIPR: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> 

SIPR: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
(send NIPR reminder)

JWICS: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>  (send NIPR reminder)

 

 

 

On Sep 6, 2013, at 5:03 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:





Hi, everybody,

 

I have a Verizon jet pack for my internet here in Massachusetts and every
once in a while huge charges have appeared on my usage, apparent downloads
of a gigabyte scale of magnitude.  I complained to Verizon and they did an
analysis of my record and tell me that these are VOIP usages.  Their
suspicion is that some teenager in my house is using the box to make phone
calls over skype.   But there is no teenager in my house and no other house
within an eighth of a mile.  Is it possible that some Trojan is using skype
to communicate.  Why?  What would be the benefit to the hacker.  Using my
computer for what?  In any case, I have murdered skype.  Is there any other
abuse of the voip protocol that could be going on in my computer?  Can I
disable voip altogether on my machine?   My service costs ten dollars a gig,
so this is not a small matter for me.  Anybody have any thoughts? 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/>
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 


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