Skype website hacked? Who is Jipikajee?

At 4:20am (EST) this morning, while comparing VoIP calling plans, I browsed to Skype‘s home page and found its usual content replaced by the single word “Jipikajee”.

A Google search on “Jipikajee” and “Jipikaje” returns mostly non-English pages. The word itself may be a character in a game and is frequently used as a username (usually followed by the epithet “motherf**ker“) for online games and gaming forums. Perhaps younger, more connected readers can help.

Searching Google for “Airlift Staging“, the page title displayed by the suspicious Skype home page, also reveals no clues other than it is a common military term for helicoptering troops and wounded soldiers out of combat areas.

I don’t know how long the “Jipikajee” content was online before 4:20am. The official Skype home page had been restored when I checked again at 4:32am.

Skype and Skype users have been targeted by a Windows worm, “w32/Ramex.A”, spread by links in Skype chat invitations. And Skype suffered a two-day outage starting August 16, 2007, when Windows update patches and some internal software flaws started a cascade of server reboots.

So far, there are no signs that my PC was been infected by the hacked Skype page.