Skype is having a party while I'm away!

RknRusty · 13 Apr 2010

Earlier this morning I had opened Skype, signed in as available, and left it standing by without ever using it. Later on, I closed it on the desktop, but I forgot that it stays open and hidden in the system tray.

I came back to the computer a couple of hours later and noticed the Send and Receive LEDs on the cable modem were burning up the information highway. I closed the only open application, MS Word and it wasn't that. I opened perfmon.exe, the windows resource monitor, and looked at the network tab. You can see the Skype activity in the screenshot:

Skype is having a party while I'm away!-capture.png

Anybody recognize that smartbro.net URL or have any idea what may have been going on? I will scan for malware in the meantime.

Thanks,
Rusty

Jonathan_King · 13 Apr 2010

Try uninstalling Skype completely and installing a fresh copy.

Jacee · 13 Apr 2010

Google

Connect to 203.111.229.242 on port 80 I have no clue, but maybe you can find out with the Google content.

RknRusty · 13 Apr 2010

Do you think it's likely that someone could have been going through my files? With as many writes as reads, there was a lot of information going upstream.

I have a backup from two days ago I can restore, but I haven't found any malware. If someone was collecting my stuff, it's too late to do anything about it now. I don't think they could get any important passwords. I never store my banking and bill paying info.

Any thoughts?

Rusty

RknRusty · 14 Apr 2010

Okay, here's our answer: Skype is apparently part of a sort of p-p network and my open program was helping pass other's messages back and forth across the internet. I didn't know that. I will never leave it unattended again. That's also probably why it takes a few clicks to close the program.

This is strange....I marked myself as "Offline" then back "Online" and checked the Network like you did. All kinds of weird sites were showing up next to Skype including virginmedia.com, ohio-state.edu, onshore.net, among many others I don't recall.

I know my computer is not infected. Apparently Skype just does this...

http://forum.skype.com/topic/18401-w...on-connection/

I thought Skype only used bandwidth when you were using it... but apparently it connects whenever it wants. Weird...