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Relevant and coincidental personal anecdote: 10 years ago I caught my x-wife in an affair as she was using this same method the communicate with her lover. Her

Relevant and coincidental personal anecdote: 10 years ago I caught my x-wife in an affair as she was using this same method the communicate with her lover. Her choice of email address for the shared account raised alarms on my firewall, so it was a simple matter to track to her machine. While she had gone to the similar trouble to delete all records on Yahoo (coincidentally), she had been browsing with IE which, due to some off-line setting, was cacheing locally all of the pages she had written. It was simply a matter of laying hands on her laptop and downloading all of that cache to expose the ruse. I cannot find the article, but I believe this method of sharing access to one e-mail account to many parties was one of the comms methods employed by the 9/11 terrorists, pioneered by Columbian drug lords.

keketi 10y ago
David Petraeus and his mistress were using the same trick: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2012/11/12/heres-the-e-mail-trick-petraeus-and-broadwell-used-to-communicate/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2012/11/12...
- 616c 10y ago
  I was recently bored and watched, after years of avoiding it, The Traitor (2008), with Don Cheadle as a terrorist ... or not so-terrorist. The movie was pretty bad (there's the real spoiler!). In that movie, which I just check the date for, seems like one of the first pop references to the idea of sharing email drafts in a free email account without sending anything. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2012/11/12/heres-the-e-mail-trick-petraeus-and-broadwell-used-to-communicate/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2012/11/12... Now, can someone prove me one better and find where this idea got traction? I honestly laughed watching that movie, wondering if Petraeus watched it years earlier, and thought to himself, I wonder if this will work in real life ... UPDATE: I could, gee, also try RTFWPA! It refers 2005 reports of AQ using the same tactic, you know, where probably he got it from. Or he got it from the movie, which would make me in a die a fit of laughter!
  - Tobold 10y ago
    I enjoyed that movie, the ending made me laugh so hard! Note that that doesn't mean it's GOOD.
    - 616c 10y ago
      Thank Allah I am not the only one. Oh crap, mission compromised! SIGABRT! Wait, is everyone in this room part of the hacker cell? Are we all hacking each other? Haha. (Honestly, what disturbs me the most is that, yet another spoiler, he puts all these suicide bombers on a bus to detonate themselves. And they never mention the bus driver who dies as part of this ruse. Not even does Don Cheadle seem to care about this guy! I found that pretty disappointing. I think that is just the underappreciated IT guy talking.)
brunoqc 10y ago
> Her choice of email address for the shared account raised alarms on my firewall What does that even mean?
- satysin 10y ago
  I would assume he means it wasn't one of the big players such as Gmail or Outlook so when he saw traffic to mail.ru or whatever service it was it looked suspicious to his normal traffic profile.
- fencepost 10y ago
  > bobbyandsue@example.com "but my name's Jim...."
- alexandrerond 10y ago
  Not really unhappy that someone cheats on husband who keeps tabs on family internet habits (to the point of analyzing http traffic destinations) and then has no reticences to running forensics on wife's computer.
beachstartup 10y ago
i'm curious... what was her reaction when you recovered the data?
- colejohnson66 10y ago
  Divorce?
  - beachstartup 10y ago
    that was his reaction.
jacquesm 10y ago
Funny, I've run the mail server of our family for quite a while and it would never enter my head to read someone else's email.
- cloudjacker 10y ago
  the mail server? how do you avoid being put in the spam bin of every email provider ever? seems like it would have been a hassle to deal with for the last 15 years
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    It may be strange to you but running a mailserver was pretty normal back in the day and even now I see nothing wrong with it. In fact, I see a lot wrong in having just a few email service providers that get to dictate terms. There is arguably something wrong with how hard it is to properly set up and secure a mail server, but the concept of running your own mailserver is no different than running your own HTTP(S) server.
    - blfr 10y ago
      It is somewhat different because you need to convince other mail servers to cooperate with yours whereas the HTTPS server works directly with clients (browsers) and may function completely independently.
      - gcr 10y ago
        I run my own mail server. It's simple enough to set up SPF in your DNS records to avoid landing in Gmail's spam, at least. Not sure about other providers. I send so little mail that I'm basically background noise.
        seanp2k2 10y ago
        It also matters if you host it at a reputable place (DO or AWS or Linode work) and if you want it easy, just wire up your mail server to a transactional email service or smtp.google.com : https://zapier.com/learn/ultimate-guide-to-email-marketing-apps/best-transactional-email-sending-services/ https://zapier.com/learn/ultimate-guide-to-email-marketing-a... It's possible to configure DKIM and SPF and your server correctly, and hopefully stay off blacklists, but if inbox deliverability really matters to you, a [no-cost] plan with a Mandrill or MailGun service should do well for you. It's what I use to have home servers and IoT things send me email, to gmail, and I never have deliverability issues.
pbhjpbhj 10y ago
I wonder if this would now technically be an offence under the Computer Misuse Act (CMA) as presumably she didn't give you authorisation to access her laptop?
- kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
  Spouses share communal property. Hard to argue that your husband can't be allowed to use a common resource of the household.
  - Oletros 10y ago
    Why do you asume is communal and not property of one of them?
    - PhantomGremlin 10y ago
      In the USA a number of states are de jure community property states. In those states, assets acquired in marriage, and appreciation in value of assets owned before marriage are both considered to belong equally to both spouses. Many other states are de facto community property states. There is often some sort of "equitable" division of assets in a divorce. In practical terms this often appears quite similar to the de jure states. One of my favorite quips was from Tom Arnold, during his second divorce. He said something like "she wants half of half of Roseanne's money".
      - Oletros 10y ago
        Thanks for the explanation. Can the members of the marriage(spouses?) change that? Here in Spain some autonomous communities (like the states in USA) have community property as default and some others have asset separation as default but when one gets married can decided which one to use
        x0x0 10y ago
        You can get a prenuptial agreement (prenup), but which laws you are allowed to override varies by state, duration of the marriage, the whims of the divorce court, and how diligent you are about keeping assets separate during the marriage. You're probably better off spending your energy on avoiding marrying the wrong person...
cloudjacker 10y ago
TOTALLYNOTCHEATING@YAHOO.COM
dpark 10y ago
I have trouble understanding why people go through such lengths to maintain a hidden affair. If you've decided to have a long-term relationship with the new person, why not just file for divorce instead of going through ridiculous lengths to hide your new relationship? It seems like a lot of trouble, plus it makes it very clear that you're a terrible person when it's discovered. Please forgive my nosy question, but was she financially dependent on you or was there some other reason for her to maintain the marriage?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- DanBC 10y ago
  Affairs aren't about leaving your current partner and starting with someone new. The point of many affairs is the keeping it hidden stuff which adds to the excitement.
  - dpark 10y ago
    Fair enough. That jives with my belief that anyone engaging in a long term affair is basically just a terrible human being, though. I'd like to believe that there is some way that people having affairs aren't necessarily horrible, but I can't see how anyone could get their thrills at the direct expense of the person they swore to love forever and not just be a horrible human.
    - brokenmachine 10y ago
      Maybe they're just not thinking about the other person's feelings. The fact they are actively trying to hide it could also be because they are trying not to hurt them. It's hard to argue that they are getting thrills at the direct expense of an unknowing party, if they don't get caught. Of course, just putting the one you're supposed to be in love with at the risk of hurt is fairly horrible. The cynic in me also just doesn't think it's sane to expect that an oath to love forever could be relied upon anyway, and the statistics do bear this out.
gerdesj 10y ago
"Her choice of email address for the shared account raised alarms on my firewall" That's a pretty serious firewall you have there. Assuming that s/he was not using encrypted smtp and imap or pop, then you still have a L7 filter that reads and logs email addresses and alarms on them. Now it is unlikely (to me) that you would have a whitelist of acceptable email addresses with which to alarm. I can think of a few other things you might have done to trigger alarms and all of them are pretty distasteful. So I will conclude you simply violated her civil rights and spied on her. I feel sorrow for you, genuinely, that you have had a relationship problem but I suspect that it would have been easier to find out what was going on in the various old fashioned ways, rather than farting around with IT and being a bit creepy.
- colejohnson66 10y ago
  You don't have to save the messages. You just need to look at the logs. If you had traffic to/from mail.google.com, no problem. But if you have traffic /to/ ashleymadison.com or whatever, that's suspicious
  - slededit 10y ago
    What’s the Big Deal? It’s just Metadata. /s

keketi 10y ago

David Petraeus and his mistress were using the same trick: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2012/11/12/heres-the-e-mail-trick-petraeus-and-broadwell-used-to-communicate/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2012/11/12...

616c 10y ago
I was recently bored and watched, after years of avoiding it, The Traitor (2008), with Don Cheadle as a terrorist ... or not so-terrorist. The movie was pretty bad (there's the real spoiler!). In that movie, which I just check the date for, seems like one of the first pop references to the idea of sharing email drafts in a free email account without sending anything. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2012/11/12/heres-the-e-mail-trick-petraeus-and-broadwell-used-to-communicate/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2012/11/12... Now, can someone prove me one better and find where this idea got traction? I honestly laughed watching that movie, wondering if Petraeus watched it years earlier, and thought to himself, I wonder if this will work in real life ... UPDATE: I could, gee, also try RTFWPA! It refers 2005 reports of AQ using the same tactic, you know, where probably he got it from. Or he got it from the movie, which would make me in a die a fit of laughter!
- Tobold 10y ago
  I enjoyed that movie, the ending made me laugh so hard! Note that that doesn't mean it's GOOD.
  - 616c 10y ago
    Thank Allah I am not the only one. Oh crap, mission compromised! SIGABRT! Wait, is everyone in this room part of the hacker cell? Are we all hacking each other? Haha. (Honestly, what disturbs me the most is that, yet another spoiler, he puts all these suicide bombers on a bus to detonate themselves. And they never mention the bus driver who dies as part of this ruse. Not even does Don Cheadle seem to care about this guy! I found that pretty disappointing. I think that is just the underappreciated IT guy talking.)

brunoqc 10y ago

> Her choice of email address for the shared account raised alarms on my firewall What does that even mean?

satysin 10y ago
I would assume he means it wasn't one of the big players such as Gmail or Outlook so when he saw traffic to mail.ru or whatever service it was it looked suspicious to his normal traffic profile.
fencepost 10y ago
> bobbyandsue@example.com "but my name's Jim...."
alexandrerond 10y ago
Not really unhappy that someone cheats on husband who keeps tabs on family internet habits (to the point of analyzing http traffic destinations) and then has no reticences to running forensics on wife's computer.

beachstartup 10y ago

i'm curious... what was her reaction when you recovered the data?

colejohnson66 10y ago
Divorce?
- beachstartup 10y ago
  that was his reaction.

jacquesm 10y ago

Funny, I've run the mail server of our family for quite a while and it would never enter my head to read someone else's email.

cloudjacker 10y ago
the mail server? how do you avoid being put in the spam bin of every email provider ever? seems like it would have been a hassle to deal with for the last 15 years
- jacquesm 10y ago
  It may be strange to you but running a mailserver was pretty normal back in the day and even now I see nothing wrong with it. In fact, I see a lot wrong in having just a few email service providers that get to dictate terms. There is arguably something wrong with how hard it is to properly set up and secure a mail server, but the concept of running your own mailserver is no different than running your own HTTP(S) server.
  - blfr 10y ago
    It is somewhat different because you need to convince other mail servers to cooperate with yours whereas the HTTPS server works directly with clients (browsers) and may function completely independently.
    - gcr 10y ago
      I run my own mail server. It's simple enough to set up SPF in your DNS records to avoid landing in Gmail's spam, at least. Not sure about other providers. I send so little mail that I'm basically background noise.
      - seanp2k2 10y ago
        It also matters if you host it at a reputable place (DO or AWS or Linode work) and if you want it easy, just wire up your mail server to a transactional email service or smtp.google.com : https://zapier.com/learn/ultimate-guide-to-email-marketing-apps/best-transactional-email-sending-services/ https://zapier.com/learn/ultimate-guide-to-email-marketing-a... It's possible to configure DKIM and SPF and your server correctly, and hopefully stay off blacklists, but if inbox deliverability really matters to you, a [no-cost] plan with a Mandrill or MailGun service should do well for you. It's what I use to have home servers and IoT things send me email, to gmail, and I never have deliverability issues.

pbhjpbhj 10y ago

I wonder if this would now technically be an offence under the Computer Misuse Act (CMA) as presumably she didn't give you authorisation to access her laptop?

kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
Spouses share communal property. Hard to argue that your husband can't be allowed to use a common resource of the household.
- Oletros 10y ago
  Why do you asume is communal and not property of one of them?
  - PhantomGremlin 10y ago
    In the USA a number of states are de jure community property states. In those states, assets acquired in marriage, and appreciation in value of assets owned before marriage are both considered to belong equally to both spouses. Many other states are de facto community property states. There is often some sort of "equitable" division of assets in a divorce. In practical terms this often appears quite similar to the de jure states. One of my favorite quips was from Tom Arnold, during his second divorce. He said something like "she wants half of half of Roseanne's money".
    - Oletros 10y ago
      Thanks for the explanation. Can the members of the marriage(spouses?) change that? Here in Spain some autonomous communities (like the states in USA) have community property as default and some others have asset separation as default but when one gets married can decided which one to use
      - x0x0 10y ago
        You can get a prenuptial agreement (prenup), but which laws you are allowed to override varies by state, duration of the marriage, the whims of the divorce court, and how diligent you are about keeping assets separate during the marriage. You're probably better off spending your energy on avoiding marrying the wrong person...

cloudjacker 10y ago

TOTALLYNOTCHEATING@YAHOO.COM

dpark 10y ago

I have trouble understanding why people go through such lengths to maintain a hidden affair. If you've decided to have a long-term relationship with the new person, why not just file for divorce instead of going through ridiculous lengths to hide your new relationship? It seems like a lot of trouble, plus it makes it very clear that you're a terrible person when it's discovered. Please forgive my nosy question, but was she financially dependent on you or was there some other reason for her to maintain the marriage?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
DanBC 10y ago
Affairs aren't about leaving your current partner and starting with someone new. The point of many affairs is the keeping it hidden stuff which adds to the excitement.
- dpark 10y ago
  Fair enough. That jives with my belief that anyone engaging in a long term affair is basically just a terrible human being, though. I'd like to believe that there is some way that people having affairs aren't necessarily horrible, but I can't see how anyone could get their thrills at the direct expense of the person they swore to love forever and not just be a horrible human.
  - brokenmachine 10y ago
    Maybe they're just not thinking about the other person's feelings. The fact they are actively trying to hide it could also be because they are trying not to hurt them. It's hard to argue that they are getting thrills at the direct expense of an unknowing party, if they don't get caught. Of course, just putting the one you're supposed to be in love with at the risk of hurt is fairly horrible. The cynic in me also just doesn't think it's sane to expect that an oath to love forever could be relied upon anyway, and the statistics do bear this out.

gerdesj 10y ago

"Her choice of email address for the shared account raised alarms on my firewall" That's a pretty serious firewall you have there. Assuming that s/he was not using encrypted smtp and imap or pop, then you still have a L7 filter that reads and logs email addresses and alarms on them. Now it is unlikely (to me) that you would have a whitelist of acceptable email addresses with which to alarm. I can think of a few other things you might have done to trigger alarms and all of them are pretty distasteful. So I will conclude you simply violated her civil rights and spied on her. I feel sorrow for you, genuinely, that you have had a relationship problem but I suspect that it would have been easier to find out what was going on in the various old fashioned ways, rather than farting around with IT and being a bit creepy.

colejohnson66 10y ago
You don't have to save the messages. You just need to look at the logs. If you had traffic to/from mail.google.com, no problem. But if you have traffic /to/ ashleymadison.com or whatever, that's suspicious
- slededit 10y ago
  What’s the Big Deal? It’s just Metadata. /s