Numerous Web sites exist which contain tools and utilities for ICQ hacking, and it seems that there appears that there appears to be a competition going on to compromise as many ICQ numbers as possible. This is possible, but seems far too laborious for application in mass hacking. They then change the password - inserting hidden ASCII characters - so even if you successfully request a password back you'll fail to type in the right phrase. Moving on, there's the idea that someone has written a script to scan accounts for common passwords (remember to make this harder by using non-alpha-numerical characters in your password). This is a plausible scenario, to be sure, but it fails to explain why many ICQ accounts NOT associated with Web mail addresses got reamed. Once this happens it's very hard to get your account back' and we understand also that it's difficult to get AOL to change the default email address to which such sensitive information is sent.

A password is then sent to the compromised Web mail account and voila!, the script kiddies have access to your account. This takes us to the popular theory that the user's ICQ account was hacked after first compromising user's Web-based accounts, such as Hotmail or Yahoo!Ĭrackers gain use of a Hotmail mailbox connected to an ICQ account (perhaps by re-registering an inactive account) before telling AOL that they've forgotten their ICQ password. This is an easy enough mistake to make, but we don't buy it, much as we incline towards the cock-up rather than conspiracy theory of history It's all Microsoft's fault Next up, we have the theory that AOL's database administrator(s) messed up an SQL statement which updated everyone's email accounts so that they were the same address. Doubtless this works on some people (AOL warns users of such messages, which it NEVER sends itself), but we're able to discount this as a complete explanation of this particular hack because we're quite sure our original source didn't fall for it.

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