In my younger days, I was a brutal little hacker punk and since I don't do that kind of stuff any more, here's how I used to crack passwords and gain access to dial up accounts. I never raided bank accounts or anything. I just never paid for internet access...ever...for YEARS.
Locally it was way too easy back in the windows 3.1 days. All I did was pop into a circuit city or someplace, find the display computer that was hooked to the internet, pretend to be checking it out and write down stuff, flip through the control panel stuff and make notes on a notepad about the bus speed, ram, harddrive space...anything really...didn't much matter as this was just to throw off the employee standing there about what you were really up to. Then in windows 3.1 version of the ISP software, if you open the ini file in ms notepad, the password was logged and not decrypted and I would jot that down too
Then go home and use their account for awhile. Later when win95 came out, they decrypted the password but there was a program called "wrench" that fit neatly on a diskette and all you had to do was pop in the disk when noone was looking and run wrench.exe and a little box would pop up revealing any stored password obscured with ****. This program may even still work for all I know. I quit using such things long before it ever stopped working. The only notable crack I ever pulled off from afar was Maury Povich's AOL account. His password was the same name of his production company that he must have thought very clever. MOPO is not clever Maury
Props to Oprah for not using Harpo for hers. Circuit City's was actually kinda hard to crack even after looking at it and jotting it down because they used uppercase i, lowercase L and the little bar thing that looks like | so their passwords would be something like llIIll||Il| and depending on your font, kinda hard to read.
I'm not bringing this up to brag. I'm bringing it up so you guys can maybe get a clue as to how easy it is and lock your stuff down better. Nobody really hacks internet accounts anymore. Now they want your ebay account, your paypal account, your bank account...your MONEY!
