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Security horizons in digital age are changing on daily basis and more threats are lurking than the day before. Key loggers are becoming the hacking and wiretapping tools of the past and as more people are using VOIP technologies, it seems hackers, and surprisingly government law enforcement agencies are getting ready for "tapping" your VoIP calls.

A newly discovered "Trojan horse" on internet that can record voice over internet protocol (VOIP) call from Skype.

That’s right Skype is no longer safe even though the Skype calls are encrypted. There is a lot of potential here for hackers and law enforcement agencies as there were 480 million users of Skype in June.

Security experts have different opinion here and are saying that this virus is for espionage uses rather broad base attacks on internet users.

Though initially the threat levels are low as hackers will have to listen to the calls for useful information, however, in this digital age computing systems have immense power and converting voice into text can also happen in real time. This however, requires huge data centers with lot of processing capacity and data transmission bandwidth, plausible for government agencies.

The virus is installed as a Trojan horse in windows operating system and clings on to the API which handles audio processing. It intercepts the audio data coming from Skype before it gets encrypted, data stream is then stored in mp3 format and sent to the Trojan controller.

The virus was designed and released by Ruben Unteregger, a Swiss programmer who said he started researching on his own before turning it into a project for his employer, ERA IT Solutions.This company was reported by a  Swiss newspaper SonntagsZeitung to have been working on a VoIP-cracking virus for the Swiss government, the sources of which have not been confirmed.

Source : http://www.smh.com.au/

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