Reactive Software Blog » AIM

AIM 6.8 Beta and AIM Password Recovery compatible, Real-Time IM

Eugene — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 20:11:24 +0000

AIM is jumping in versions from 6.5 directly to 6.8 despite having only one more-or-less significant change (Real-Time IM).

Just a short post to say that AIM Password Recovery has been tested under the new Beta AIM 6.8 that was released yesterday. Happy to say that decryption went fine. The algorithms didn’t change. Thanks AOL team!

Links:

Download AIM Password Recovery
AIM Password Recovery homepage

AIM Password Recovery helps to recover forgotten passwords when everything else doesn’t work

Eugene — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 21:34:42 +0000

AIM is by far the most popular IM on the market with 53 million active users. Many people tend to keep their password saved on the AIM so that they don’t have to type it in every time they switch on their PC. Once they enter it, they never have to use it again until they want to move their AIM account to another PC. Just at this time they realise that they have forgotten what their AIM password is.

You could reset your forgotten password through the official AOL password reset page unless of course you don’t have access anymore to your email you used to register your AIM screenname or the date of birth you entered was wrong.
There is still a chance if that “unless” scenario is true:

Previous versions of AIM stored passwords in the hash form (not possible to decrypt). The latest generation of AIM (version 6) stores passwords in the decryptable form.
A tool that recovers forgotten AOL Instant Messenger Passwords is called AIM Password Recovery

This is likely to be the first tool to be able to recover passwords from the latest AIM since version 4.8.

Links:

Download AIM Password Recovery
AIM Password Recovery homepage

AIM Password Recovery compatible with latest AIM 6.5.4.16

Eugene — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 19:44:34 +0000

AOL released the new version of the most popular instant messenger in the world - AIM 6.5.4.16. The password encryption algorithms embedded in the version 6.5.4.16 are the same as in the previous versions.

AIM Password Recovery is confirmed to work with the latest version 6.5.4.16.

Links:

AIM Password Recovery homepage
Download AIM Password Recovery

Password Recovery for AIM Beta 6.5.3.12

Eugene — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 09:59:09 +0000

We have just installed the latest beta of AIM (6.5.3.12) to test whether the passwords saved by this beta can be recovered using our AIM Password Recovery tool.
I am very happy to confirm that the latest beta is also supported by AIM Password Recovery and the passwords can indeed be recovered.

Let us know if it does not work for you.

Links:

AIM Password Recovery homepage
Download AIM Password Recovery

Password encryption in AIM Lite (LAIM)

Eugene — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 22:45:04 +0000

Today we wanted to see if we can add support for LAIM (AIM Lite) to our new AIM Password Recovery tool but stumbled upon the same issue as we did with AIM 4.8-5.x passwords. Currently, the recovery for LAIM is not possible because password hashes are stored on the local system. As I have explained earlier about password encryption in Skype hashes are non-reversible.

C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\LAIM\screen_name.txt has the following string:

aimcc.connect.host.passwordHash=hashed-aim-password

This is the exact location where the hashed AIM password is stored.
Things might change in the future and we constantly monitor AOL resources to get the fresh info asap but for now the LAIM password recovery is not possible.

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New release: AIM Password Recovery

Eugene — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 21:24:01 +0000

We are very proud to announce the new tool called AIM Password Recovery.
As you might have guessed from the name this program finds, decrypts and recovers passwords stored by AIM (AOL Instant Messenger).

Version 6 and above are supported at the moment. Our tool is possibly the first one to support the password recovery from the latest version (other tools offer recovery for AIM versions up to 4).
We could have done a release much earlier for the previous versions but the previous version (5) stored only password hashes locally. Password hashes can’t be easily reversed into decrypted passwords (only bruteforce or lookup, which are useless for any password longer than 7 characters).
New version (6) stores the passwords locally (although encrypted). To find out more about the encryption method - go to the AIM Password Recovery homepage.
Number of other Instant Messengers also store password hashes instead of decryptable strings on the local system e.g. ICQ (owned also by AOL), Skype and others. According to Wikipedia AIM article,

along with the release of AIM 6.0, AOL opened AIM to developers which allowed anyone to create a plug-in, or custom AIM client for Windows, Macintosh or Linux.“

I think that this must be the primary reason why AIM team had to switch back to storing the decryptable version of password locally.

Although it is possible to recover passwords from AIM versions below 4.8, we have not implemented this decryption in the tool since it is highly unlikely that you are still using any of these old versions. Give us a post in the comments if you need to recover AIM password from version below 4.8. We might consider adding it if we get enough requests.

Links:

AIM Password Recovery homepage
Download AIM Password Recovery