Hacking or trying to login to other members' accounts

Yup... like mine would come back from conwaycorp.net

Hrm... who on here lives in Conway and uses that service?

I can only think of two that i know for sure use it, not sure on the others from here.

 

One of many reasons I hate AOL. It's pointless to block an AOL IP because everything goes through proxy servers and the user's IP changes all the time. And unfortunately AOL's a big enough ISP that you can't just block the whole thing or you shut out innocent users. As an email administrator, this makes it really frustrating for me when I'm trying to block spam. Lots of it comes from AOL. Lots and lots, and the users never even know they're sending it.

Although the IP is useless for identifying the person who's doing this, there's another thing you can do that might help to figure it out. Netcraft says you're running Apache on Linux. Do you have access to the Apache logs on your host? You can see the user agent strings. Will tell you the operating system version, browser... Will probably be something generic, but you might get lucky. Maybe they're using Safari or Opera...

 

I thought most servers use dynamic IPs. I know mine does, it changes from time to time.

 

I was once a Network Operator for an IRC Network, dealt with similar situations with bans and what not (we called em K-Lines). AOL is very difficult to deal with I know I had run in's with them myself there are just so many IP addresses it is useless to try and ban them. You may get rid of the offender (for now) but in the process ban like 500 other people.

I can imagine it has only gotton worse with more and more people having High Speed Internet Connections, (one reason i'm glad I'm not an IRC Op anymore), back then Dial Up was still the norm and High Speed was for the privledged few who could afford it.

I for one do hope you catch the person responsible and have changed my password as a precaution .

 

Stefan,
Do you contact the person whose Log-in this person is trying to use when you find these events? If it were mine they were attempting to use, I would want a heads up. Thanks for the good work.

 

Yes, that is true. Almost all residential IP's are dynamic, but with most people having cable or DSL these days, they usually hang onto the same IP for months at a time. And dialup users will generally have at least a similar IP each time, although they will change often each time they dial in.

AOL on the other hand, they might change IPs in the same session.

AOL is the devil. They killed the Internet.

 

I'm sure they realize it once they try to log in and get that message

 

The forum sends an automated email to the address the person used when they signed up on the board (the person who the account rightfully belongs to). After 5 attempts, the person attempting to hack the account will receive an error message stating they have used up their quota of 5 attempted logins and must wait 15 minutes to try again, unaware the automated email has been sent to the rightful owner of the account.

There is basically no way to permanently ban anyone by their I.P., but their profile can be permanently disabled. It is relatively easy to get around I.P. bans and create another account, though.

 

Unaware...until now...thanks Jamie...

 

Any decent hacker will hide their real address, which is probably not the case here. Having a secure password and changing once in a while should be best everyones practice.

I really do not see a huge gain by hacking someones account on this site. Half of the passwords are probably "chevysucks" anyway!

 

Well, I think the whole point of this thread is to try to detour people from attempting this. Maybe if they know what happens, they won't try it...

 

Yep. A decent hacker is not using AOL. This is just dumb luck in his favor...

 

hell ya never know... free trials work wonders...

 

I am an admin on gaming servers and forums we have seen this done before, heck we have seen people give out their passwords to people to do something and their whole world ends up going to crap...

One thing I figured I better add, we are all human and unfortunitely we do things so that we can remember. Most people have four or five different accounts relating to different things, like your email, a photobucket account, ebay whatever...we have found alot of people use the same password over and over on most if not all of their accounts. If you did recieve one of these messages saying your password has been locked I would suggest you think about your other accounts because you might want to change those passwords too. Too many of us make ourselves easy targets, we promote that we use Yahoo, Icq, AIM, Myspace and other things and tie all of them together by the same password.

It is very very easy to have your paypal and ebay account password re-sent to your e-mail and if you use the same password that you used in the forums you could easily end up with a few purchases you might not know about......This happened recently to one of our forum members...the sad part is she gave her forum password to her 12 year old grandson and he figured out that it was the same as her ebay account, none the less she had to have her ebay account suspended due to all of the things he bid on otherwise it would have cost her a little over $700 bucks..He thought he needed a PS3 and a few games to go with it....

If this does not help anyone hopefully it atleast gives them something to think about.

 

Very good post.