Users of the service can now feel a little safer from these online attackers with a new privacy level.
Online trolls are becoming a growing problem in several markets, such as in gaming, and angry, bitter, mean or sore losers in games have used Skype to attack people in order to vent their frustrations, but that service is now boosting its mobile security in order to make that more difficult.
Skype has boosted its default privacy features to protect users – especially gamers – from angry rivals.
The service, which is owned by Microsoft, recently made an announcement about this online and mobile security move being made primarily to protect gamers. It explained that the service would, by default, hide the IP addresses of its users as a part of its most recent update. Prior versions of the service did not hide the IP addresses of the users. What this meant was that hackers who knew what they were doing would easily be able to obtain someone’s IP address and, therefore, target their computer or mobile device.
This online and mobile security news is meant to keep people safer from angry internet trolls.
While the threat from trolls may not sound like much, online gaming is actually quite a serious business. People take their battles to heart and when they lose a match or a challenge, some sore losers take it upon themselves to seek revenge. Among the ways these attackers can do this is by launching a DDoS, which is a distributed denial of service attack. That type of attack knocks the victim offline.
That said, in order to launch a DDoS, requires the IP address of the target. By removing that information from the mix, Skype is hoping to make it much more difficult for bitter trolls to be able to take out their revenge on others.
This problem with IP addresses is actually one that has been in existence for quite some time, including over Skype. In fact, when research was conducted on this issue, it was found that the problem through Skype, alone, of allowing hackers to discover the IP address of an intended target had actually gone back as far as 2010. However, it wasn’t until two years after that time that reports of obtaining IP addresses over Skype had started to land in the public spotlight. The latest update to the service is meant to remove that online and mobile security problem, completely.
