CyTRAP Lab’s Choice - free tool - Skypekiller
The best peer-to-peer communications applications provide free, user-friendly and high-quality voice, video, instant messaging and conferencing capabilities. That word free makes these applications appealing to individuals and small businesses looking to save money on phone calls.
The challenge is that logging internal and external communication is difficult with such programs as Skype and may, therefore, make it impossible for the enterprise to be legally compliant.
Yesterday we outlined how Skype gets past the corporate firewall:
- Nice to know - why your corporate firewall could fail to prevent employees from using Skype
Today we present a tool that helps you kill Skype on your private or corporate network.
_Fact sheet about Skypekiller_
| costs | freeware |
| software | Skypekiller |
| release date | 2005 |
| platforms | Windows |
| author | IS Decisions |
| language(s) | English, French |
| size of program | 700 KB download |
| download from | Skypekiller - IS-Decisions |
| more information | FAQ and additional insights about Skypekiller |
Skype can be a concern because it also makes extensive use of “supernodes”–clients that become major switching points for Skype traffic and support Skype clients outside the Skype network. Supernodes make it possible to use diverse paths through the Internet for getting around bandwidth problems and dealing with clients using NAT (Network Address Translation).
Unfortunately, by having some of your employees’ workstations becoming part of such network and routing calls in and out of your network, much of the enterprise’s Internet bandwidth is being used. Worst is that this happens even when no one in the firm’s network is a direct participant in the call.
_Evaluation sheet for Skypekiller_
| Pros | user interface, easy to administer, uses few resourdces, can be used for scheduling system scan to remove new installations |
| Cons | you have to register and “… accept to receive (by e-mail only, on a quarterly basis) information regarding IS Decisions products.” |
_Watch Out_
It is probably a good move to run Skypekiller in the “detect only” mode first and record the results.
Thereafter, use a network monitoring tool to check on bandwidth usage during peek hours for the firm’s network. Then once again, run Skypekiller and remove listed installations. Onece the Clean step is completed, running the network detection tool again will give one the opportunity to see roughly how much bandwidth a particular VOIP or IP telephony application/s was/were using (we will present such a monitoring tool within a few days, of course for you to test drive).
Get more tools from CyTRAP Labs’ choice list here:
- CyTRAP Labs’ choice - free tools for security buffs and administrators
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