Reveal your saved Passwords in Firefox

Many users save their passwords in Firefox so that they do not have to enter it again when visiting the website it was saved for again. Firefox remembers the password and enters it automatically if the user selected this option on his first visit. This is great for us lazy users but poses the problem that we sometimes can’t remember the password when we need it again.

A classic example would be a Gmail user who has been using the Gmail website so far now trying to get the POP3 access running. So, what is this user going to do ? He actually has several options to reveal the password in Firefox. The first that comes to my mind is the ability to go into the security tab of the options. You do find a show passwords button there that displays all passwords, usernames and site urls.

I have written about this before and want to concentrate on other possibilities. Please note that a master password has to be entered for all the following methods if one has been set.

1. Greasemonkey Scripts:

If you are using the excellent Greasemonkey extension you can choose from a wide variety of scripts that reveal the passwords:

Show Password on Click - displays the password if you click the password form.

Show Password onMouseOver - reveals the password if you hover the mouse over the password field.

Unpassword - changes the type of the password form to text which always displays the passwords as text.

2. Javascript Code

Paste the following line of code into the address bar and hit enter to reveal the password on this website.

javascript:(function(){var s,F,j,f,i; s = ""; F = document.forms; for(j=0; j<F.length; ++j) { f = F[j]; for (i=0; i<f.length; ++i) { if (f[i].type.toLowerCase() == "password") s += f[i].value + "\n"; } } if (s) alert("Passwords in forms on this page:\n\n" + s); else alert("There are no passwords in forms on this page.");})();

3. Firefox extension

Unhide Passwords - this extension does basically the same as the Unpassword Greasemonkey script.

[via gHacks]

How to find stolen laptops

Bad things happen online. Trade secrets are lost or stolen. Personal information is compromised. Copyrights and trademarks are infringed. Bloggers post confidential, defamatory, or just annoying information. Websites host stolen credit cards, hacking tools and techniques, or other things that you might not want.In the course of investigating these things, companies or law enforcement agencies frequently need to rely on information in the hands of third parties. An example of this is the various companies that offer data or computer locator services. A sort of "LoJack(tm) for stolen computers.

If a corporate computer is reported lost or stolen, these services use various means to identify the computer, or the data on it. When the target computer is then used - generally to get online - the computer essentially "phones home" with its location.

Here's the problem with this approach. The computer doesn't really give its location. At best, it can reveal the Internet Protocol (IP) address of the network it is on. While this information is helpful to the true owner of the computer, it is not sufficient to locate and/or recover the stolen hardware.

Imagine that your "On-Star(tm)" equipped car is stolen. OnStar is one of the various services that provides motorist assistance, including Global Positioning Satellite location data. If you report the car stolen, they can remotely turn the GPS on, track the car, and even turn the telephone inside the car on and listen into the thieves' conversations. All of this occurs on the network the real owners own and it reveals information about your vehicle. So, no problem, right?
Finding subscriber information

When it comes to network based investigations however, we cannot easily track where the computer went. Once we have the IP address, we would look up the network that was assigned that block of IP addresses. It might be an internet café in Riga, Latvia, or a giant Internet Service Provider in Dulles, Virginia.

What we really want is subscriber identification information. That is, what subscriber was assigned that particular IP address at that particular instant. Now of course, a lot of this information may be spoofed, and it is usually less than trivial to piggyback on a legitimate network (such as, a hacker using an open or insufficiently secured WiFi network). Nonetheless, tracking down physical location data or subscriber data from a raw IP addresses is the ultimate goal of the investigator.

This is where technology and the law intersect - and not in a good way for either of them. While you can do a traceroute or a WHOIS search in a couple of seconds, in order to get subscriber data from an ISP requires some form of legal process (usually). ISP privacy policies legitimately protect this data, but they generally contain a provision (and one would be implied by law even if it wasn't in the policy) that the information may be disclosed if there is a "valid legal order."

In the case of law enforcement agencies, there are many legal avenues for obtaining this information from ISP's. First, they can just ask for it - obtain consent. In extreme situations (imminent threat to health and safety) the promise of a later subpoena may be sufficient. In the United States, for example, they can also use various legal processes - a grand jury subpoena, a formal investigative demand, an administrative subpoena, a discovery order, a search warrant, a Title III wiretap order, an order issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Or, as recently revealed in the New York Times, various agencies including the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency (and of course the FBI) can issue what is called a National Security Letter (NSL) on their own authority to get this information.
by the register.com