Symantec, the security company behind Norton Antivirus among other things, claims that they’ve found a trojan which can record conversations had on Skype. This is to my knowledge the first piece of malware anyone has found actually capable of SkypeSkraping. Called Trojan.Peskyspy (great name, eh?), the malware works by creating an MP3 of the call and later transmitting it from the infected machine. As MP3 files are relatively small, anyone with an infected computer probably wouldn’t notice the new files being created. And while Symantec does not seem to have found many machines infected with the trojan, they have found that the source code for Trojan.Peskyspy is now publicly available, which is kind of scary.

Trojan.Peskyspy is perhaps the biggest risk for political dissidents who oppose oppressive regimes. Many political activists around the world use Skype because, at least until very recently, there was no way to tap into conversations had over the popular VoIP service. But now that’s going to change. China has a whole team of hackers on its employ whose only job is to shut down dissent. Now all they have to do is come up with …

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