Echan

Hey all

I speak to a friend of mine a lot over AIM and occasionally MSN. They recently told me that they got their roommate to admit to reading all our instant messages over the last several months while intending to spy on someone else. I'm told that they caught on because the guy occasionally mentioned minor things they had no business knowing.

All the issues aside, I am fairly unhappy about it. I reviewed everything I said and there's nothing to hide, no sensitive information was read or anything of the sort, but I feel I still need closure. It's just a personal space I feel really uncomfortable about when people invade. I type when someone is looking over my shoulder and I get nervous for no apparent reason when a friend is flipping through my ipod or checking their email on my laptop.

That being said, I don't really know the person and I'm more like the collateral damage in whatever their insane quest is. My friend told me that they changed the password on the router, but I need to know if that even did anything. I'm curious as to what methods they could have used to do this and which ones if any are detectable. I realize I could just communicate with something that's more secure, but I just need to learn about this for my own peace of mind. I need to know what they likely did for closure. It sounds bizarre but it's sort of like how family members want to know what their loved ones last moments were when they get into an accident/murder.

I know that they previously had full control of the router(wireless, does this matter?), set up the network and runs a linux box if that helps. From there, all my research is going in circles due to inexperience. I've read about Squid, transparent/intercepting proxies and setting up a linux machine as the DHCP server, it's mostly gibberish for me and I'm not sure which of those actually need router access, or if there are settings in the router I could ask to be checked to tell if they are continuing the behavior.

I also Googled up endless shareware that allows you to spy on aim conversations. I get the impression that those just sniff packets out of the air and that the only encryption is the WEP which they already have to access the internet and no setting on the router is going to prevent that.

Any information would be appreciated, sort of driving me nuts knowing that some friends creepy roommate would spy on them like that. As a side note, I just want to learn enough to know how it works without knowing enough to be able to do it myself if that makes sense.

Thanks