Network Engineer Gets Back At His Cheating Wife And Her Boyfriend

During the last year or so of my marriage, I was spending a lot of time out of town, commuting for 3-4 days a week for work. One night I was working remote and decided to do some upgrades on my home computers, so I remoted in. I notice that the connection is REALLY slow.

I do some network traces and find that my wife’s computer is participating in a video chat with someone in another state, one where she has no family that I know of. Huh. Curiosity piqued, so I start to monitor more stuff, like IM conversations which are not encrypted.

Over the next few weeks I keep my mouth shut as I collect more evidence, mostly Yahoo! and AIM conversations. I also had installed security cameras around my house because we had problems with the neighborhood kids, and eventually I catch footage of some guy coming and going from the house – at one point even driving my car. I still keep my mouth shut because I know if I say anything my wife would just lie about it and somehow make me out to be the bad guy. I know who the guy is by now, and I gather more data on him. And then he does it. He plugs his laptop into my network.

So, I’m a network engineer and security admin by trade. I know networks, I know how to monitor them, and I know how to… fiddle with data. My wife knew this, the guy she was messing around with knew this, but he was still dumb enough to enter my domain and play around on my network. I start grabbing usernames and passwords, email accounts, IM accounts, etc. I reroute all of their web traffic through a proxy so I can monitor where they go and how they login. Eventually I hit the jackpot – dumbass runs a fairly well known gaming forum that is a major source of revenue for him, and he logs in without using SSL.

He thinks it’s secure because vBulletin hashes the password before sending it in clear text. However, if you know the hash you can use it just as well as the password itself! I use his admin username and password hash to login and make a few admin accounts for myself, naming them something inconspicuous and changing the account creation date to make them look old. At this point I could have just wiped his entire site, but that would be too easy to fix – simply restore a backup. No, I had a better idea. Every day I went back and deleted random posts older than 6 months. Then I deleted every post older than 6 months. I did this for 3 weeks straight before the guy suspects anything. I notice he kills one of my admin accounts, so I quickly assign admin privileges to my wife’s account then delete all my other admin accounts.

She calls me in a panic because her new boytoy is flipping out on her because it looks like she is the one who “hacked” the forums and deleted the content. Thousands of posts are gone and there is no way to restore them because a full restore would wipe out 3 weeks of new posts. She appears to be the only other person with admin access aside from the owner, and he is PISSED. I plead ignorance and pretend I never knew about the forum until she called me.

There is no reason I would know about the forum. They never made the connection between him using MY home network and his forum getting hosed. To this day new users are not allowed on the site unless they are referred by an existing member.

They never figured out what happened. The incident caused him to break off whatever he had going with my wife, which really left her stranded when I told her a month later that I was divorcing her. I had collected enough evidence from their IM conversations and her forum posts to satisfy my need for closure. She still has no idea how much information I gathered about her second life.