TippingPoint Digital Vaccine Laboratories
DID YOU KNOW... The DVLabs research team discovered 10 unique Adobe Shockwave vulnerabilities during October and November of 2010.

Trillian's Weakness Saves Me From The Creeping Death

This past week, the drive on my primary workstation entered the final stages of the Creeping Death -- the disk disease that starts with the occasional corruption of individual sectors that culminates in total permanent failure.

Since I had a little time left before headcrash finality, I started shoving everything I could off my sick drive onto my backup device (my laptop), for later rebuilding. After the first round of copying, I pretty quickly realized that I didn't migrate over my Trillian-managed IM accounts and contacts. I could tell because my productivity shot up with the lack of IM's bugging me all the time -- and it was then when I knew something was amiss. So, I hooked up last-legs drive again, started Trillian, and looked for the "Export Contacts" and "Migrate Profile" buttons.

Sadly, there aren't any. Google was no help, either (though there are at least a couple people selling Trillian Password Recovery kits). But after a few minutes of poking around, I did stumble across a solution -- just copy my %TrillianInstallPath%\users directory from the old machine to the new. And hooray, that worked like a champ, and nobody can tell that I've moved!

Trillian stores pretty much all local configuration as INI files -- including contacts, usernames, and passwords. Sure, the passwords are encrypted, but that doesn't really matter -- if you get a hold of your aim.ini file, you can just reconnect with your old ICQ account without having to remember what that password was.

Alternatively, if you get a hold of someone else's aim.ini, you can reconnect as them.

As a bonus, this impersonation trick is made much easier by the fact that Trillian's default file permissions for the users\ directory is inherited from C:\Program Files -- which is typically set to Users\Read. The "Users" group, of course, is also usually where all domain users go -- so if you merely log in to your trillian-using friend's workstation, you can snag all his credentials... and logs of prior conversations, usually. I'm sure that would make for some funny pranks later on, especially if you work with incorrigible chatters like I do. :)

But! Never mind that! That's neither here nor there. The important part is that if you need to migrate your Trillian profiles/logs off your drive in a hurray, it's easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy. It would be almost as easy if Trillian (sensibily) stored the secret-ish stuff in <tt>Documents and Settings/%user%/Application Data</tt> and inherit those permissions, but I'm not complaining.

 

Tags:
Published On: 2007-10-10 17:30:55

Comments post a comment

  1. Anonymous commented on 2008-10-24 @ 21:39

    Just FYI - Trillian passwords aren't encrypted - they are encoded (and very insecurely). In addition to the password recovery utilities for sale, there is also a free web based decoder here that doesn't require you to download anything:

    http://trillian.net-info.us/

    P.S. I know this is kind of old - but I just found it and thought others may like to know...


Trackback