It’s a Skype wide problem

**Freddie** · August 16, 2007, 10:05 AM

I don’t know how many Skype users we have in these forums but we use Skype at work and its currently not working. Yesterday people in our office got sent a message with a URL asking them to look at some photo’s on a webpage, when you clicked on the link you were asked to install a programme called pix.exe. If you installed it your computer is now infected with a Trojan virus which means a hacker can gain access to it.

Make sure you virus definitions are up to date and run a full system scan, this virus is not particularly harmful or hard to remove it was just cleverly distributed. It worked by sending you a Skype messages from someone in your contacts so you wouldn’t be suspicious and the message was perfectly innocent (the one we got asked to look at some holiday photos).

I don’t know for sure if the two incidents are separate or if they are both related (I’m guessing the latter), but currently the official Skype website is down. Just don’t bite your friends head off, if you got sent the message with URL!

Regards
Freddie

**Professor420** · August 16, 2007, 10:09 AM

That's a pretty common type of virus, I have gotten such messages from AIM and MSN... I just MSN the person to go to icrontic.com to help get rid of it and block them and tell them to email me when its gone, to decrease my chance of infection.

The outage is a software problem, apparently.

**Vanquisher** · August 16, 2007, 04:38 PM

Have they shut it down temporarily? It's not been connecting all day for me.

**Freddie** · August 16, 2007, 04:40 PM

Originally Posted by Vanquisher

Have they shut it down temporarily? It's not been connecting all day for me.

I'm not sure, I sure it is temporary but it seems to taken an age to fix. I've been using Skype for 2 years this the first time I've ever had a problem with it.

**Shaun** · August 16, 2007, 05:35 PM

Ah, thanks for the advice Freddie! I occasionally use Skype when talking to Friends when we are playing a game, but not this week, so this problem did not affect me. By the sounds of it, it looks as if you are safe as long as you do not install the program... but money says some idiots installed it.