How to hack a former employee's LinkedIn account

This is a surprisingly easy way that employers can hack into a former employee's LinkedIn account. They can change anything they want, including password and the former employee wouldn't know until it is to late. This was a discovery I made today when...

I received a phone call from one of my former colleagues. She was having trouble changing information on the company's LinkedIn page. Seeing as how I used to be one of the admins, she tried to login with my company e-mail. At one point  I had added my company e-mail as a contact. I no longer use that e-mail and thought the account was deactivated. However, like with most companies, the mail account can be remade or retrieved.

Now it is important to note that I originally registered with a different e-mail to linkedIn and had a different primary e-mail address than my company e-mail. What I did not know, was that if you have an e-mail address associated to your profile account, you can login using that e-mail as a username.

So she had my username. Then the password was all that was needed. For this a simple password recovery sent to the company e-mail was all that was needed to reset the password and voila, she was in my account. But unfortunately I was no longer admin of the page, so she had to start all over. She was nice enough to call me and tell me what my password had been reset too. To be honest I was really amazed that she was able to do this so easily as she is not someone who I would call technical.

So how to you keep your old employer from taking your account? Make sure to remove any past e-mails from your account. This took a little searching to try and find where it was.

How to keep linkedin safe from former colleagues

1. Hover on your name in the top right corner, and select settings from the drop-down menu.

2. Under your profile picture click on Primary E-mail address CHANGE/ADD

3. Now remove any former e-mail addresses. Try to keep it to just 2 e-mails max.

That's it, your a bit safer now. I hope you enjoyed this post. If you did please share it with friends or colleagues who would find it useful.

Create Passwords EZ with L33T

The other day I was helping my friend Isabelle out with her blog. Of course setting up a blog with your own hosting etc. you need some good passwords, for example many sites insist that you create an extra strong password. Isabelle was having trouble with good passwords that were easy to remember. I told her about my L33T technique and she thought it was brilliant. Here is what I told her.

A good password has a number of letters and text at least 8 characters long. Many sites require this. However most people just use thier phone number, or name or a word which are all easily hacked using a dictionary or number crack. As I talked about before, having a few passwords for different sites is a good idea. I usually say 3 max so that if one doesn't work, you can try one of the other 2 before getting locked out. This is because most sites allow for password retry for 3 times. Ready to make one of your own?

1. think of a phrase that you like or can easily remember. A good idea is to have some letters like O and I in it. for instance: "I Love Gummy Vodka"

2. Writedown your phrase on a piece of paper and start replacing letters for numbers. Also add a couple letters as Capitals. 1LuvGummEV0dkA

3. There is your new password. however if you are still having trouble with it, just take your phrase and place it into a LEET translator, and remove the spaces to get this: 1l0V39ummyV0Dk4

4. No this is not a password I use, but I am waiting for my gummy bear vodka to be ready. Another week or so now I think.

Leet is a style of writing that popped up on the message boards when certain words were being censored or filtered and has found it's way into our culture. Much of the LOLSPEAK and SMS or TEXT message techniques we use today are derived from LEET speak. Thank you L33T for helping me remember my passwords.

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MacBook Pro Boost Graphics Tip

Those of you who have a new Apple MacBook Pro may or may not be using the full potential of the graphics card. Recently I installed Boinx TV onto my computer, to play with this live recording app on the mac. When I started it up, it asked for me to use my Higher Performance graphics card. You see on the MacBook Pros are available with 2 graphics cards.
1. NVIDIA GeForce 9600M
2. NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT

Apparently the default settings in System PReferences-> Energy saver had set my graphics to "Better battery life" even when plugged in. I simply switched it to "Higher Performance" and now it seems HD renders, and other graphics intensive projects are going faster.

So if you are having performance issues with graphics on your MacBook Pro, check the System Preferences like above and switch. Only bad problem is you have to logout and login again when you switch. Bummer.

Hope you enjoyed this little GabeMac tip.