Re: How to obtain a yahoo username off a computer

["Matthew Durkin" <matthew_durkin () hotmail com>]

Just to add my 2 penneth:
Targetting an individual in this way has definite legal implications. I work
for a large company, and we have to be *very* careful when doing any kind of
investigation on an individual. Involve your HR department (They ought to
already be involved and should have expertise in this area), and also your
legal department.
To the best of my knowledge, you are able to use system logs that are
collected generally from all systems, and for all employees, but there's a
huge can of worms if you target an individual by adding extra logging.
I don't think it would be an unreasonable exercise if you added monitoring
for all employees and made all employees aware that their activites will be
monitered and action taken agains said activities. This is seen to be
fairer, and less likely to land you in mess re privacy regs etc.
I am by no means the expert on this, but in previous investigations at my
company, we have had to be very careful in these areas.
Matthew




----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Potter, Tim" <Tim.Potter () clarkconsulting com>
To: <security-basics () securityfocus com>
Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2003 5:12 PM
Subject: RE: How to obtain a yahoo username off a computer


Hmmm.. Don't know if I should be offended or not :)  But since I'm
paranoid as well, I won't be offended.

Seriously, I appreciate all the responses.  Sniffing traffic has always
been at the top of the list, but I wasn't sure that yahoo usernames
would be passed through in the clear.  We could care less about he
password, we just want to verify this person used this username.  So I
think we'll go down the sniffer route unless that doesn't work for some
reason.
Thanks for your help!

By the way - cookies, .dat files, etc. don't help.  They can tell us
this person has been to Yahoo, but will not reveal the username they
used.  Inside the Yahoo cookie is what looks like an encrypted string
that Yahoo will understand when they log on.

-Tim

-----Original Message-----
From: Curt Seeliger [mailto:seeliger.curt () epa gov]
Sent: Wednesday, June 11, 2003 6:53 PM
To: security-basics () securityfocus com
Subject: Re: How to obtain a yahoo username off a computer



There's been a variety of helpful responses to the original request now.

There are good reasons for doing what he wants to do, but (and I'm in no

way impuning the original poster by asking this) there are some crummy
reasons as well.

How do any of you know this isn't part of a stalking, or background info

for more social engineering, or yada? Near as I know, you don't.  Sure,
this is worst case scenario, but isn't paranoia part of the game?

> -----Original Message-----
> To: security-basics () securityfocus com
> Subject: How to obtain a yahoo username off a computer
>
> Hello!  We have a security issue and need to know who is using a
> particular Yahoo user ID from within our company.  We are about 90%
> certain of the person's identity.  This user has been deleting his
> cookies and temp Internet files.  We want to search his computer to
see
> if Yahoo ID xxxx is somewhere on his computer.   We know the Yahoo
user
> ID - we just need to confirm that this person is using it.  We don't
> want to contact Yahoo because we don't want to go down the legal road
> needed to get them to release the info.  Any ideas? Thanks,

-- 
Curt Seeliger, Data Ranger
CSC, EPA/WED contractor
541/754-4638
seeliger.curt () eqa gov

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