Skype made a funny "explanation" of the problem...

Lets say, people download updates on Tuesday in the US, on Wednesday in
Europe and just happen to reboot their computers simultaneously on Thursday?
:)

As I remember, there were two primary theories of the problem source:

1.. Microsoft's updates
2.. DoS attack
It seems Skype has decided to make their own theory based on these two: so
it was a DoS, but not an attack, and it was updates fault, but not Microsoft's.

I do believe that the DoS Exploit, published at www.securitylab.ru, might
have such an impact, but it's impossible to prove anything and it's not
necessary. I just would like to say, that Skype could came up with more
realistic story, for example: someone made a mistake in the code, or they
were trying to implement new feature and everyone would believe, even me :)

Best regards,

Valery Marchuk

www.SecurityLab.ru

----- Original Message -----
From: "Steven M. Christey" <coley (at) mitre (dot) org [email concealed]>
To: <tecklord (at) argocom.cv (dot) ua [email concealed]>; <bugtraq (at) securityfocus (dot) com [email concealed]>
Sent: Monday, August 20, 2007 8:39 PM
Subject: Re: Skype Network Remote DoS Exploit

>
> The outage being experienced by Skype was apparently due to massive
> simultaneous reboots and reconnects after systems installed their
> Windows patches.
>
> from http://heartbeat.skype.com/2007/08/what_happened_on_august_16.html:
>
> The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users'
> computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they
> re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows
> Update.
>
> The high number of restarts affected Skype's network resources.
> This caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the
> lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction
> that had a critical impact.
>
> I wonder how many other services are impacted by simultaneous Windows
> scheduled updates.
>
> Anyway... given that this was going on at the time the SecurityLab.ru
> exploit was released, and the exploit only claims a DoS (and only
> seems to make a series of requests to long URIs), was the exploit
> actually effective, or was the "DoS" just part of the larger outage?
>
> - Steve

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