The over 10 million users of the standard Skype app in the Android market may be leaving their personal information wide open for a potential hacker to easily peruse. According to our friends over at Android Police, Skype is leaving your contacts, profile, instant message logs, and more without encryption or proper permissions. Actually, that isn’t even the tip of the iceberg here. All of your friends’ information, cell phone number, date of birth, etc. etc. can all be exposed without much work by even a novice hacker.
To prove that this information is readily available, AP tossed together a quick app that grabbed everything it asked for from within Skype directories without having root access or any other special permissions. Pretty shocking, right? Oh, this also affects the leaked Skype with video as well, but for some reason, Skype made sure to lock down the Verizon version.
Skype is apparently looking into the issue, but for now if you can’t part ways with the app, I’d recommend that you refrain from downloading any odd apps from the market for a couple of days and stick with well-known developers. Basically, I’m saying that this wouldn’t be the time for a late night “Sexy Girls” search in any Android market.
Via: Android Police
This post was last modified on April 15, 2011 8:48 am