14 DAY TRIAL // An Anonymous-affiliated hacker that goes by the name of Stun, claims to have leaked Skype’s source code and the de-obfuscated binaries as a form of protest against the “governmental backdoor.”
“After Microsoft acquiring Skype for 8.5 billion dollars and proceeding to add back doors for government to the program, the software has been hacked and it's source code released,” Stun wrote next to links that point to three files hosted on The Pirate bay.
The hacktivist motivates his actions by pointing to articles that show that Skype is utilized as a medium to spread viruses onto the computers of activists from Syria.
However, experts state that the source code published by the hacker is actually the one leaked some time ago by a researcher who reverse engineered the Windows binaries.
Security researcher Janne Ahlberg says that the same files have been distributed already earlier this year. Furthermore, he believes that they’re part of the reverse engineering case in which Skype pursued the researcher, accusing him of “unauthorized use of their application for malicious activities.”
“I managed to get a copy of the file ‘skype55_59_deobfuscated’ from May. It is not Skype source code, but a reverse engineered version of the Windows binaries. The tool used in reverse engineering seems to be IDA disassembler/debugger,” Ahlberg told Softpedia in an email.
“Stun's tweet seems to be based on this reverse engineering project,” he concluded.
So there you have it. It seems that this is nothing more than a classic case of a hacker that takes the work of others and publishes it as his own.
Sophos researchers have analyzed the reverse engineering case of the Skype protocol. Head of Technology Paul Ducklin presented a detailed scenario of what would happen if the popular application’s source code actually got leaked.