A series of quick manipulations - and your Skype account is hacked. All the hacker needs to know is your email address, as the Russian users have found out this week.

      The hacker hunt has started for real after the Russian blogger and owner of SUP Media (that owns LiveJournal) Anton Nosik announced that his Skype account was hacked, and he could not log in. But it was soon reported that Skype engineers have first been notified of the problem in summer, yet nothing has been done to assure security of user accounts. As a result, multitudes of Russians who used to Skype to save money on calls throughout Russia and abroad now say that their accounts no longer work.

      The procedure, publicised on Xeksec forum which later became unavailable, is apparently very simple. The hacker uses a victim's email address to register a new Skype account. After this the hacker only needs to use a "restore password" service to access a list of all accounts registered with the same email address and to change  their passwords. 

      Microsoft has not yet commented on this, although Skype confirmed they have been working to resolve the problem and to improve security. Skype has presently disabled the password reset option for all accounts.

      Meanwhile it is advised to change your current email address associated with Skype, preferably the one only known to you which you should also keep to yourself. 

How to change your email address in Skype (courtesy of virtulis user of Reddit; and you can read a full Reddit thread): 

      

      
• log in on skype.com (if you still can, that is)

      
• go to the profile, click Edit and add an email address an attacker won't guess. (Or your-email+something@gmail.com if you're using Gmail)

      
• click Save

      
• click Edit again, set the new address as Primary

      
• click Save, have a laugh at the message, enter the password and click the Enter button or it won't work (like one bug was not enough)

      
• delete the old email.

      

And here is a step-by-step guide to both hacking a Skype account and changing an email address is it was hacked.