Both emails encouraged me to contact customer support. I did so only to be met with a request to fill out an online form with an incredible amount of personal information to verify the account. Why would I provide 10X the personal info that might then be made accessible to a user whose email address was swapped into the account with no verification at all?
Does anyone have any advice on how to resolve or escalate to Microsoft? Ideally the original email address on the account would be restored and more broadly, Live / Skype should update their security procedures to avoid this type of "easy to steal accounts" security policy while hard to block the stealing of accounts.
Any help / suggestions appreciated.
First eBay bought what they thought was Skype but instead was only the license to the branding and users and not the p2p backend tech the swiss guys still owned. Then Microsoft stepped in out of nowhere to take the useless brand from eBay and the actual backend only to promptly throw away the entire backend and move to a centralized unencrypted model.
I'm not sure how much diligence Ebay ever did on their purchase of Skype, but it never seemed to me like they had a credible business plan for what to do with it. Something something about integrating with sellers. Felt more like the leadership there suffered from some Bay Area strategic acquisition envy. I remember being on painful calls with Ebay and Skype engineering who had very different ideas of how infrastructure should be deployed.
Anyway, Ebay spun off Skype (at a loss) to private equity ... not to MS. Skype floated around in PE for a few years before the (enormous) MS purchase. MS promptly put Skype in an advertising division of all places. I've heard rumors that the DoJ encouraged MS to make the acquisition ... to get Skype calls in the hands of an entity that would be more favorable to lawful interception requests. MS certainly has a painful history with the DoJ, but I really don't know if it's credible or not.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/05/skype...
I used skype before I had ADSL, and was amazed at the quality.
After MS bought it, I noticed a drop in quality, as well as an increase in reports of said drop online.
> First released in August 2003, Skype was created by the Swede Niklas Zennström and the Dane Janus Friis, in cooperation with Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, and Jaan Tallinn, Estonians who developed the backend that was also used in the music-sharing application Kazaa. In September 2005, eBay acquired Skype for $2.6 billion.[11] In September 2009,[12] Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz, and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board announced the acquisition of 65% of Skype for $1.9 billion from eBay, which attributed to the enterprise a market value of $2.92 billion. Microsoft bought Skype in May 2011 for $8.5 billion. Skype's division headquarters are in Luxembourg, but most of the development team and 44% of all the division's employees are still situated in Tallinn and Tartu, Estonia.
This by itself looks like a phishing attack. Did you click a link to Skype support in the second email message or find it by yourself going to the Skype website and browsing around?
So, maybe it could be legit.
Edit: new link here
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/skype/forum/all/skype-ac...
When Live and Outlook got merged (IIRC a couple of years ago), my @msn.com address got an @outlook.com alias.
Unfortunately, this "alias" shouldn't have been one and the email was actually owned by someone else.
By some sort of failed merging, I hence ended up getting access to someone else' emails: PayPal related emails, Dropbox access connected to this email account, private email exchanges, etc...
I tried to reach out to Microsoft but hit (expectedly) a wall.
It’s arguable that something like u2f is more secure but with a good TOTP app usability is not the problem.
Hi, this is Samnwa, your brother, we talking yesterday about xyz, how is that going? btw, could you help me login to my bank, can't find my key card, can I use yours? Cool, alright, Just enter this number... Ooops I entered it wrong, lets try this number...
Fortunately my account was not in the process of being hacked, so I was more willing to provide information. Yet despite that, they would not provide me access to my account, and thus I have not used Skype since.
