Purported Skype Worm a False Alarm

Consider an earlier warning by some news organizations that a self-propagating worm making its way through the Skype network a false alarm. Websense, the company that first disclosed the threat on Monday, retracted its earlier statements Tuesday and called the vulnerability a Trojan horse instead. The changes were made after the firm discussed the issue with the development team at Skype.

"The behavior of this Trojan using the Skype API is as per the specifications of the API. The end-user who is running Skype does get notified that a program is attempting to access it and must acknowledge it," the firm wrote in a new alert. "There is no vulnerability in Skype at this time that has been uncovered." At the time of this story, the site hosting the Trojan was down.