[Bassgeye]

While in Montana on an open WIFI connection my wife was hacked. Her AOL password was somehow read when she signed in and then changed. Several travel sites she writes for were also hacked into and childish activities took place. Her home computer was off so I do not understand how they might be able to remotely delete "saved on my PC" emails.
There was no virus on the laptop and none on the home PC. She has several folders containing e-mails related to upcoming trips that are now gone.
1st question. Is it possible that the hacker set the AOL service to delete these things when she started the computer and software? It makes no sense to me how these folders saved on her PC were deleted. They were not saved on AOL and should not have been accessible.
2nd question. Is there anyway to get these back?

[LiveBrianD]

I would IMMEDIATELY contact AOL and ask them to let you reset your password, as well as restore the deleted emails. Often, when an email is deleted, even if it's not in the 'deleted items' folder, it's still on the server for a week or two (hotmail now offers a way to restore these, for instance). I don't use AOL myself, so I can't comment on the rest.

It's possible someone used firesheep (a firefox addon) to catch your login cookies while they were transmitted. Often, sign-in is encrypted (HTTPS), but the actual session isn't. See if you can change that to https all the time. (gmail does that by default now, hotmail can be set to do that, yahoo can't, not sure about aol)

[Bassgeye]

I'm pretty adept at computer repair and most issues but not having used any hacker software I'm unfamiliar with anything but how to remove virii so although I know about Firesheep I'm not familiar with all that can be done with it. I'll install it and play with it on my home WIFI to see what I need to do. I will also set her up with a VPN for travel.
She has already reset all passwords but the e-mail she had saved to folders in her PFC on the home PC were months old and pertain to an Ireland trip in a few weeks. Confirmations, cancellations, etc. and will no longer be on AOL servers. Being a travel writer she gets a lot of comped tickets and tours so these are some of the lost documentation. It will be a nightmare getting it all back the hard way but we will try if no one knows if we can retrieve it from the hard drive or AOL software.
I'm still curious as to how her home computer and hard drive AOL PFC was affected remotely. From all that I know there is no setting that should have deleted these folders on her home computer. Neither her laptop or the home PC has a virus.

[LiveBrianD]

Bassgeye, on 18 March 2012 - 03:56 PM, said:

I'm pretty adept at computer repair and most issues but not having used any hacker software I'm unfamiliar with anything but how to remove virii so although I know about Firesheep I'm not familiar with all that can be done with it. I'll install it and play with it on my home WIFI to see what I need to do. I will also set her up with a VPN for travel.
She has already reset all passwords but the e-mail she had saved to folders in her PFC on the home PC were months old and pertain to an Ireland trip in a few weeks. Confirmations, cancellations, etc. and will no longer be on AOL servers. Being a travel writer she gets a lot of comped tickets and tours so these are some of the lost documentation. It will be a nightmare getting it all back the hard way but we will try if no one knows if we can retrieve it from the hard drive or AOL software.
I'm still curious as to how her home computer and hard drive AOL PFC was affected remotely. From all that I know there is no setting that should have deleted these folders on her home computer. Neither her laptop or the home PC has a virus.

Contact AOL support about this and ask them to restore the emails. I'm not sure how aol's software works, having not used it, but with hotmail you can sync it with the desktop program Windows Live Mail, and if some moron gets into your account and deletes messages, they'll be deleted from your PC too when you sync it with the server. That may be the case with aol.

[Bassgeye]

No, you cannot sync AOL's web browser to the AOL program on a PC. It's possible it is a huge coincidence and the PFC got corrupted at the same time these other things occurred.
There is little chance AOL would be able to restore e-mails up to a year old. It would also mean going through a years worth (or however far back they would go) of e-mails looking for the ones lost. Add to that we do not pay for AOL so would have to pay for customer support that in MHO will be useless.
I'm hoping someone familiar with AOL 9.1 knows of a way these folders can be recovered. I'm leaning, at this point, that a glitch caused these saved folders to be deleted and not the hacker.

[LiveBrianD]

Bassgeye, on 18 March 2012 - 07:19 PM, said:

No, you cannot sync AOL's web browser to the AOL program on a PC. It's possible it is a huge coincidence and the PFC got corrupted at the same time these other things occurred.
There is little chance AOL would be able to restore e-mails up to a year old. It would also mean going through a years worth (or however far back they would go) of e-mails looking for the ones lost. Add to that we do not pay for AOL so would have to pay for customer support that in MHO will be useless.
I'm hoping someone familiar with AOL 9.1 knows of a way these folders can be recovered. I'm leaning, at this point, that a glitch caused these saved folders to be deleted and not the hacker.

No, I mean syncing aol email to the aol pc program. I think they may be able to restore recently deleted emails - after all, if I deleted a 5 year old email in hotmail yesterday, I can restore it. (even if it's gone from the 'deleted items' folder) As I said, contact aol support NOW and ask them if they can do that. They can probably do this for free.