Skype come clean on BIOS intrusion

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9 Feb 2007

Skype have released an explanation on why a file named 1.com is spying on you and reading your motherboard serial number from your computer BIOS. It’s all to do with Skype extras.

Skype Extras are plugins for Skype to provide extra functionality, some are for fun and others provide business applications. The Extras manager relies on software developed by EasyBits Software and this is where the problem lies.

The EasyBits software includes a form of digital rights management functionality intended to protect commercial software, such as plug-ins, from illegal redistribution or unlicensed use. Simply put, the EasyBits DRM framework helps us ensure compliance with software usage and distribution.

To enforce these license agreements, the EasyBits framework attempts to uniquely identify what physical computer it’s running on. One way to do this identification is to simply read the serial number of the motherboard, which is often available through a public query to the BIOS.“

So there you have it, it’s a reasonable explanation, just a pity that the software wasn’t fully tested on all versions of Windows before compatibility issues came to light from users. Skype have now updated the version of EasyBits software that they use and tell us that the new version does not attempt to read your computer BIOS. One can’t help but wonder what it’s reading instead – Skype didn’t comment on that…..