Could be that it wasn’t worth the effort: Microsoft corrected the manner in which Skype for Business handles emojis and got the patch out lickety-split. This time around, Microsoft didn’t identify any workarounds or mitigating factors. Once they’d been closed, users could then turn off emoticon animation in the Option dialog box. You couldn’t stop your CPU from draining away while they were open. The fix for the 2015 vulnerability was simple: close the conversation windows. As SEC Consult put it, multiple animated emoticons would “cause a client’s CPU usage to go through the roof.” This has happened before: in 2015, Skype for Business had the same kind of emoji-overload vulnerability. If a sender continues sending emojis your Skype for Business client will not be usable until the attack ends.

When receiving about 800 kittens at once, your Skype for Business client will stop responding for a few seconds. If such a jerk were to keep it up, a business would be up a creek without a paddle, says SEC Consult: You don’t want some jerk – like, say, a disgruntled ex-employee – to lob gobs of nonstop kittens at your operation.

Microsoft issued a patch for the vulnerability – CVE-2018-8546 – which affects Office 365 ProPlus, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Lync, and Skype. Even so, if your business depends on Skype to hold staff conferences, client calls or any other form of communication, you should hop on the patch installation. Throwing 800 animated emojis at the app turned the emoji marauders into the forces of darkness in a denial of service (DoS) attack, causing Skype to keel… SEC Consult reported last week that it had discovered that launching 100 animated emojis (the security firm chose to focus on kittens, because, we assume, KITTENS) at Skype for Business caused it to flutter, triggering a short lag in the application.

For the second time in three years, there’s a vulnerability in Microsoft Skype that could get communications tangled up in bouncy little kitten emojis (or any other kind of animated emojis, for that matter).

Skype for business emoji pack