Skype's twitter, facebook and blog account hacked by Syrian Electronic Army

The Syrian Electronic Army, an amorphous hacker collective that supports Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, claimed credit on Wednesday for hacking into the social media accounts of Internet calling service Skype.

The group also posted the contact information of Steve Ballmer, Microsoft Corp's retiring chief executive, on its Twitter account along with the message, "You can thank Microsoft for monitoring your accounts/emails using this details. #SEA"

The hack became obvious earlier this afternoon when Skype’s Twitter account published a tweet telling people to stay away from Microsoft services. Along with its own tweet, Skype’s Twitter retweeted one of SEA’s tweets.

While its presence on social media websites has been targeted, Skype itself has not been affected by the SEA hack, meaning that users of Skype and other Microsoft services should not be worried.

The SEA's latest attack appears to be linked to documents released by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, which revealed the PRISM surveillance programme.

PRISM is said to give the NSA and FBI easy access to the systems of nine of the world's top Internet companies including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo and Skype. 

The programme apparently allowed the NSA to spy on audio and video calls using so-called secret backdoors. Skype has denied the existence of such access.

In Microsoft's case, the Guardian newspaper claimed the documents showed that the NSA had access to most of Microsoft's flagship products including Hotmail, Outlook.com, Skydrive and Skype.

The NSA reportedly said in the documents that it had improved its oversight of Skype so much that it could now collect three times as many calls from the service than before.

Even before Skype was bought by Microsoft it was providing information on some of its users through the surveillance programme known as Prism, the report had claimed.

Since the revelations, Microsoft has teamed up with seven other leading technology firms to form an alliance called Reform Government Surveillance group.