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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Microsoft's Skype service will now hide the IP addresses of users by default [pcmag.com]:

The Microsoft-owned chat service recently introduced the ability to hide your IP address, but has now enabled this setting by default in the latest version of its desktop and mobile apps.

"This measure will help prevent individuals from obtaining a Skype ID and resolving to an IP address," the Skype team wrote in a blog post [skype.com]. As Engadget noted [engadget.com], the move is intended to prevent online harassment in the gaming community, specifically.

Talk of this issue dates back to at least 2011, when researchers from the Polytechnic Institute of New York University warned that it's possible to leverage a service like Skype to track a person's whereabouts [pcmag.com]. "Specifically, if Alice knows Bob's VoIP ID, she can establish a call with Bob and obtain his current IP address by simply sni?ng the datagrams arriving to her computer," the researchers said.

The following year, a Pastebin user posted instructions on how to exploit a flaw [pcmag.com] in the Skype network to determine another user's IP address. At the time, Skype called the problem an "industry-wide issue faced by all peer-to-peer software companies."

From the Engadget link:

Losing a multiplayer game leaves some people so angry that they'll go out of their way to force fellow players offline. In order to do this, gamers can use tools to locate a target's IP address from just their target's Skype username and then launch a DDoS attack to overload their internet connection.

Original Submission