The hacker group loyal to Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad has recently managed to break into the online calling service Skype. A few days ago the Syrian Electronic Army published the contact information of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, suggesting that someone might want to call him.

It seems that the Syrian Electronic Army is upset that the tech giant is monitoring all Skype calls for the American spooks. Although most people would consider this outrageous, it doesn’t tend to generate so much outrage as what else Syria can do.

A message published on Skype's official Twitter feed on the first day of the year, apparently by the hacking group (as it included hashtag #SEA), recommended people not to use Microsoft emails (hotmail, outlook), as those were monitoring all accounts and selling the data to the governments.

Messages like those were also posted on Skype's official Facebook pages and on its website blog. Millions of people could see them before they were removed in late afternoon. However, the Syrian Electronic Army later tweeted out copies of that message "for those who missed it”.

It should be noted that this week a monitoring group claimed the death toll in Syria's civil war, which started three years ago as peaceful protests against 40 years of rule by Assad's family, had increased to at least 130,000.