CyberTeam Hacker Group Claims Responsiblity for Scuppering Skype With DDoS Attack

Hacking group CyberTeam has claimed responsibility for a Skype outage that has blighted the service for the past two days.

The outage which began at 7:01pm UK time on Monday appeared to knock the service offline for many users, causing login problems and prevented messages or voice calls from being made.

A tweet from the CyberTeam hacking group appeared to claim responsibility for causing problems with the Microsoft service; “Skype Down by Cyberteam,” the tweet boasted.

Skype rushed to fix the problems, which appeared to be a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, and the service appears to be in good working order at the time of writing.

Skype scuttled

The outage affected the UK and many European regions according to a map displaying the areas hit by the outage.

A brace of updates to the outage situation was all that has been received from Microsoft’s Skype division, the latest  of which said: “We have made some configuration corrections and mitigated the impact. We are continuing to monitor and we will post an update when the issue is fully resolved.”

Microsoft gave no hint as to whether the outage is indeed a DDoS attack or just  an outage with its servers supporting the instant messaging service.

As such, there is little information to how exactly the service was disrupted or if CyberTeam are genuinely behind the attack or if its tweet was simply hollow bravado. Another tweet from CyberTeam noted that the hacker group would aim at taking down global games service Steam as its next target

Claiming responsibility for DDoS attack may not be the most savvy of move, particularly when a British youth recently received a two year prison sentence for running the ‘Titanium Stresser’ DDoS attack tool from his bedroom.

DDoS attack are also a problem in the cyber security world that just will not go away; their unsophisticated yet brutal nature can overwhelm many websites and online services, including Internet banking services as Lloyds found out earlier this year.