China spies with Skype
Wed, October 08 2008
Skype president Josh Silverman said the company was unaware that the Internet chat of users in China, especially political discussions, was being stored on computer servers by Chinese mobile firm TOM Online, a unit of Hong Kong-based TOM Group Ltd.
In a statement, Silverman said the U.S. company owned by auction giant eBay was “very concerned” about the monitoring and storage as well as a security breach that was discovered by Canadian researchers.
The messages and personal information were stored on insecure publicly-accessible servers together with the encryption key required to decrypt the data, found Ottawa-based Citizen Lab. TOM has since acted to make its servers more secure.
TOM-Skype made it publicly known in 2006 that it filtered text messages for politically sensitive words, such as “Tibet” or “democracy,” and blocked transmission of those judged suspect and assured users that censored messages were discarded.
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