There’s a rather amusing side effect of having the latest version of Skype installed on your computer. The Internet Explorer and FireFox plug in, which turns all phone numbers into clickable links, is causing concern for people who use online banking. Every so often the plug in will find an account number or transaction reference, which looks like a phone number and will turn it into a clickable link along with a small picture of the flag corresponding to the country code.
Heise Security reports three instances with the German Sparkasse bank, Skype have yet to respond to them. It appears there is nothing on a webpage to tell the Skype plug in that a number is not a phone number. Online bank accounts have lots of attractive numbers for Skype to parse, so it’s not surprising it picks up a few telephone numbers which are not actually telephone numbers.
If you see a clickable phone number in your online bank statement don’t worry,you haven’t been hacked! It’s just Skype trying to be helpful! 🙂
One Response
LOL, yes, I’ve had this happen with my online banking. Rather disturbing the first time you see it – but of course there’s nothing in HTML markup etc. currently to indicate that a set of numbers is or is not a phone number.