New release: AIM Password Recovery
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.
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