Hacking G-Mail, Yahoo, Myspace, and Other User Accounts Using Social Engineering.

Social engineering, the ultimate way to hack password or get the things you want. How most people get into accounts like G-Mail, Yahoo, MySpace, Facebook, or other online accounts. Most people think that hacking a password you need to be computer savvy. This is not the case, those people are crackers. They use custom code or programs to break the passwords. The best way is to use social engineering, I will explain later in the paper why. Before I go any further into this paper, that this information is for research and to increase your knowledge and awareness about security. Also, I hope it will teach you what to watch out for.

Most of you probably think that getting passwords is a very difficult thing, it is not. Yes, if you want to be able to get into every account the same way this takes skills, probably something that you don't have. I am not calling all of you stupid, most people can't do this. I know that I can't. Being able to get into all account normally takes finding a flaw in the programming. This take knowing what to look for and keeping it a secret when you find it. The moment you make it public or tell someone else, the bug/flaw will be fixed. So if you find a site on the internet telling you to follow the following steps and you can get into any account you want. More than likely it is old and will not work. It will probably make it into that sites logs and if they ever decide to try and prosecute people for trying to hack an account you are in their logs along with a lot of information you did not know that they are gathering.

First, never do anything that will get you in trouble or arrested, it is not worth it. If you were to do anything illegal, never do it from a computer that you own or that can be traced back to you. You want to do it from an internet cafe with no cameras that you can pay in cash. Next you never want to do it from your house. Once you have followed these two things you are ready to go. Step one, you must figure out what is you want to do. Are you trying to get in to a G-Mail email account, Yahoo email account, AOL email account, myspace account, or some other account? Who does this account belong to, it it a lover, friend, boss, or someone else you know? This is very important when doing social engineering. Why? Because information is your best friend, you are using the weakest element, humans and human information. You are not going to crack a password easily.

Step two once you have figured out who or what your target is you want to go into the gathering information stage. Say you want to get a password for a G-Mail account you would go to the G-Mail forgot password site and copy down all of the possible forgot questions. These questions would more than likely be things like: What is your mother maiden name?, What is your pets name?, When is your birthday?, What high school did you go to?, and so on. Once you have all the questions you want to figure out what your targets answer to these questions would be. These answers give you the keys to the kingdom, the Holy Grail to this persons account.

Step three you want to find out if the site has an option for forgot password, but no longer have access to my email account. This is the flaw in most of the systems. If you know enough