Tonight at work, a co-worker of mine said that her husband hacked into their computer and found out her AOL password. She wants to know how he might have gone about doing this and also how she can protect her password better. (No comments on the state of their relationship please Just know he’s determined to keep figuring her password out!) She has AOL 6.0.
Change it regularly, and make it something non-obvious. Don’t use birthdates, middle names, children/spouse names/initials/birthdates.
If you don’t want someone getting in, don’t tell the computer to save your password. I know that my msn access gives me the option to save my password, so that I don’t have to type it each time I sign in.
Not being an AOL user, and being unfamiliar with the hacing to get passwords, my suggestions only include general password security.
Another password tip: mix letters and numbers. Also, DO NOT use the auto-sign on option. A friend of mine did this and his computer crashed. When he got it back up, he realized that he had forgotten his password (since he was used to signing on automatically) and had to jump through of fire with AOL to get get it straightened out. If you’re forgeful about passwords, write it down and put in a secure area like a safety deopsit box at the bank.
General password security:
Mix letters and numbers, using at least six characters. Don’t pick entire words if possible, but pick combinations - for example, “apple37home”. Combining is handy if anyone every tries a dictionary attack on your password file - not something you’re every likely to face at home, but general good practice for password administrators at work.
Don’t pick words or numbers that have an obvious significance to your life - family names, dates of birth, hobbies and so on - as experienced hackers often do a lot of “social engineering” in advance.
Never, ever write your password down and leave it near your PC. Ideally you should choose something as memorable as possible with the rules above in mind.
As for hacking AOL passwords, I don’t think you’ll get an answer here, for two reasons: one, there could be a lot more background nobody knows about (e.g. “hacking” could be something as simple as her husband having found a text file on her PC with all her passwords written for convenience), and two, if it’s a genuine hacking technique I doubt the mods would appreciate it being posted here!
if you store your password to sign on automatically or to access your filling cabinet you can bring it up using some programs. Revelation is one that I use.
there are also ways of capturing keystroks w/ some programs.
Also AOL keeps (or at least used to) an email log that is viewable using a text editor (it might work for im’s too)- it doesn’t look pretty but it us readable.
AOL uses an encoding that would be impossible to get thru. He probably found it mentioned in another way or the autologon was enabled, which puts in the PW itself but he doesn’t know what the word really is. its just *******
Hmmm, stuff to think about. I’ll ask her more details at work tonight! Thanks for responses everybody!!
There is a program that can tell you what ****** really is when you hover the mouse pointer over the password box.