funny little story from my a+ class

I was taking a class this week for A+ OS certification. We got to a section on setting up an e-mail account with outlook. A few people in the class said they never did that, so the instructor has us do a quick walkthrough on it.

We used actual pop3 and imap servers used by the local phone company. Then just had us a use our first name for the username and a password of password. The instructor figured everyone would get an invalid username/password when trying to connect to the mail server. Wrong. Oddly enough, one account actually worked and returned some 200 new messages.

On the other hand, it is distrubing to know people actually use "password" as a password

Squires

Junior Poster

125 posts since Jun 2004

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7 Years Ago

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Yes it's quite disturbing......I have also run across many people who buy a modem/router and when you type in 198.162.1.1 in address of Internet Explorer to set up your internet connection for the first time a web page come up and the default settings are UN admin and PW ( well there is none). After connecting to the internet they never go in and set up a password, this is an easy way for a young and inexperienced hackers to get directly into your system and lock you out of your own computer.

<<seS>>Saint

Newbie Poster

15 posts since Jan 2005

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5 Years Ago

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You know... I hate to admit this, but I actually had that happen to me once. Not because I didn't know what I was doing (honestly), but because I got lazy.

I set up my router, got everything all set up, and didn't bother to set a WEP key or password on the router, thinking "Oh, if it's open for a day or two, it's no big deal." That night I went to the gym, got back, and couldn't connect to my own router. Someone had gotten on, set a WEP key, and stuck a password on it! Of course, I just hard-reset the thing and it was fine (believe me, I got right in and set up WEP key and password, along with MAC Address filtering).

All I could think was "Geez, didn't take long for somebody to find that!"

PirateTUX

Junior Poster

101 posts since Jan 2007

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5 Years Ago

0

same!

i think my neighbors are pilfering my wifi :(
not for much longer though hehehe

jbennet

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18,523 posts since Apr 2005

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