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Kelly Jackson Higgins has a
story about how I hacked her 10 years ago, by sniffing her email password via WiFi and displaying it on screen. It wasn't her fault -- it was technology's fault. Sooner or later, it will betray you.
The same thing happened to me at CanSecWest around the year 2001, for pretty much exactly the same reasons. I think it was HD Moore who sniffed my email password. The thing is, I'm an expert, who writes tools that sniff these passwords, so it wasn't like I was an innocent party here. Instead, simply opening my laptop with Outlook running the background was enough for it to automatically connect to WiFi, then connect to a POP3 server across the Internet. I thought I was in control of the evil technology -- but this incident proved I wasn't.
By 2006, though, major email services were now supporting email wholly across SSL, so that this would no longer happen -- in theory. In practice, they still left the old non-encrypted ports open. Users could secure themselves, if they tried hard, but they usually weren't secured.
Today, in 2016, the situation is much better. If you use Yahoo! Mail
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