Skype’s new security feature to hide IP of users

Skype will introduce a new security feature aimed at protecting gamers from sore rivals. The Microsoft-owned service recently announced, that with the latest update, it would start hiding users' IP addresses by default. Earlier, hackers could easily obtain users' IP address and target their computer.

Online gaming is a serious business and people who lose major online battles or matches at times can turn vindictive enough to seek revenge. One easy way of doing that was to launch a distributed denial of service attack knocking their victorious rival offline.

But to do that one needed the target's IP address, which is actually pretty easy if one knew the target's Skype name. Users need not  even be capable programmers as many websites called 'resolvers' promised to reveal a Skype user's IP address.

The issue of discovering IP addresses via Skype had been public knowledge for several years. Researchers had discovered vulnerabilities allowing hackers to obtain someone's IP address via Skype as far back as 2010, though, it was not until 2012 that reports about obtaining a Skype user's IP address grabbed public attention.

Users who want to ensure their IP address was hidden by default when using Skype, need to make sure they were using the latest version of Skype for desktop and mobile, which you can downloaded directly from Skype.

On their desktop, users can go to Help > Check for Updates to see if an update was available.

"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.

In 2011, researchers from the Polytechnic Institute of New York University warned that it was possible to leverage a service like Skype to track a person's whereabouts.

"Specifically, if Alice knows Bob's VoIP ID, she can establish a call with Bob and obtain his current IP address by simply sniffing the datagrams arriving to her computer," the researchers said.