Re: Skype in the Enterprise

[Simon Lucy <simon.lucy () bbc co uk>]

Mike Gatti wrote:

> Hello Everyone,
>
> I wanted to get the groups opinions/thought on how you would or currently handle users wanting or using Skype in the 
> enterprise.
> Recently what has brought this to light was the fact that our firewalls started to deny/shun users randomly from access 
> to the internet.
> After a couple of dozen packet captures and cross checking software installed on the clients machines we narrowed down 
> the culprit to be Skype, which later we validated in Lab.
> What we saw was in random intervals all skype clients would send a burst of requests to the internet which would 
> trigger the  intrusion detection threshold of our security appliances.
> Given that there were no changes to those thresholds I am left to ask what caused this behavior to start, a software 
> update or an update to the skype network (if it can be called that)?
> I am trying to educate myself a little more before facing the lynch mobs when I start advising on a solution.


You can start with the network admin's guide if gives the basic 
characteristics of normal Skype network behaviour and how it punches 
through NAT, STUN etc.

http://download.skype.com/share/business/guides/skype-it-administrators-guide.pdf

S

> Thanks for taking the time,
> --
> Michael Gatti
> main. 949.371.5474
> (UTC -8)