Possible Skype Adware

[RoboMan]

Have you experienced this? I got a message from a known Skype contact, no text but a suspicious link. The domain is safe (www.baidu.com), follow by suspicious strings (link?url=1YxX5U09eSI3yKXUZULd83F20c2r4jrtx9WslhKUhlC&id=live:skypeuser).

Spoiler: Full Link (beware)

https ://www. baidu.com/link?url=1YxX5U09eSI3yKXUZULd83F20c2r4jrtx9WslhKUhlC&id=live:skypeuser

I replaced my actual Skype user with "skypeuser", because it seems it sends the link with the actual user you're sending it to. I opened a safe isolated browser and this link redirected me to an ads page, but asked for no login or downloading anything. Seemed no xploit no weird stuff. So far, i investigated and found out it's a kind of adware compromised accounts automatically send.

Have you recieved any link like this on your Skype account? How do you get your account compromised if the link redirects nowhere dangerours?

Feel free to move the post to another section, did not know where to post.

 

[reboot]

I have seen it myself. It often has my contact's usernames in the URL. I don't click on it. My friends will then contact me apologising for the spam and having no idea how it got there.

I would suggest deleting the URL from the spoiler. I would imagine the MT forum would probably have some sort of "NoFollow" plugin to discourage search engines but just in case... I don't think the spammers deserve any link love.

 

[Myriad]

I did some extensive digging around in Skype last year after I noticed " anti-social " activity .
I didn't see the issue described , but I found that Skype was consistently dropping a tracking cookie called adnxs

I tried increasing IE security settings to max ( Skype uses it in the background ) and/or blocking adnxs in the Hosts file .
Both methods resulted in some loss of Skype functionality , so I decided to go for 100% loss of Skype functionality

Jitsi and the Tox variants give me everything I want from a VOIP app .

On the plus side , there is no central server , so any logging is done only on the user's machine , and that can
be disabled with just one click .
On the minus side , you need to get your regular contacts to use the same service ( not so easy )
because there is no cross-platform compatibility .

The older I get , the more hardened my attitude becomes :-

" If it looks like doo-doo , and smells like doo-doo , then it's probably a M$ product "

 

[Ink]

@Myriad Does your method affect both Skype for Desktop client and Skype UWP for Windows 10?

 

[Myriad]

@Myriad Does your method affect both Skype for Desktop client and Skype UWP for Windows 10?

Sorry , but I can't answer that one for you .

W7 is the only thing I have as a bare-metal install , the more recent OSs are VM only and I have never installed Skype in them .
I could probably check it out with W10 at a later time , but it would be a low-priority task right now , with my current work-load .

Hopefully another member will chime in soon , with some real-world experience of this issue in W10