From Russia with love... Did Russian Hackers overtake in effect Chinese Hackers in the race to reverse engineer the Skype.exe ? This time it's not a hoax or an unfulfilled promise. Here is the QtSkype4.exe.

I just picked this up from my anonymous contacts… Basically I got a sneak preview of an executable program that looked exactly like the original Skype.exe (except for logo ...), but only it is not Skype. I am sharing the information here. «Sharing is good». Where did hear that before ?

The QtSkype4.exe is not yet logging on the p2p-user-database "but that would be fixed very soon", my source said. Apperently they have just reverse engineered the user-interface and now the rest will follow ? Hm, that would interesting to see.

It’s NOT some stupid screen mock-up. It’s indeed a real working program (the version that I just received) but it’s not providing any login, dial or chat functionality yet. It does run as an executable.

Here are the screendumps of QtSkype4.exe

And it’s using the following modules :

Now all this might be very interesting, but I think there will be a problem for Skype if somebody manages to access the skype user cloud directly without having to go over their propietary system. Call it connectivity, call it p2p freedom call it hacking. Call it what you like. It is happening and that is the point. Such type of Skype clones will certainly make the whole ball-game more interesting.

No further interpretation is needed. All that has been done already by others.

From Russia with love... We’ll see next week or next month what will be the reality of this attempt. I do believe it’s geniune, but then again that was also thought of the Chinese Hacker that had reverse engineered Skype (Skype Reverse Engineering attempt in China). In the end we have seen nothing. So let’s wait and see what the Russian come up with.

See what I blogged earlier on the 1st publicized attemp to reverse engineer skype (china attempt).

• who funded this research ? who is working behind the screens ? why, how, where ? how long has it been going on ?

• what is the relation (if any) between www.vozin.com / www.talqer.com / www.hanzen.cn and the alleded group of chinese skype engineers.

• is there a relation to www.coobol.com (site offline but in the cache of google) or not ? And if so why has that not been disclosed.

• what is the function of the www.voipwiki.com/blog. Smoke Screen or Marketing Tricking, creating hype before a launch of this Skype Clone ?

• why and how long will this information be hidden from the public.

• what else has been going on behind the smoke-screen ?

• how lethal (if so) could that be for the original Skype.exe

• what type of investigations are going and will be going on?

• what are the consequence of being involved in such activities?

• how will it affect the business-model and activities of Skype/Ebay?

• how might this skype clone be marketed and under what domain-name ?

• when will we see the final proof (under the form of an executable) surface ?

• is there a relation to the earlier miniskype.exe ?
  This story will certainly have another long tail. I am convinced that the current «no comment» position of Skype shows that this matter is investigated and probably it’s not only Skype that is investigating this matter too. Another thing comes to mind is wether Ebay would have Skype monitoring the Skype-contacts-list,chats, conversations and related. It should not be so difficult to do a content-search and map out of some «who’s talking to who, when and about what» diagram…

see also Skype Reverse Engineering attempt in China.