Infidelity in the Information Age: How I Caught My Cheating Girlfriend ---------------------------------------------------------------------- By atoma On a recent Chicago evening, while my live-in girlfriend of three and a half years was at work, I performed some routine maintenance on my home/office DSL/LAN computer network (three PCs {2W98SE 1 XP Pro}, one laptop {XP Pro}, one Xbox, one shared printer, and other PCs and Macs as business dictates). I am a computer repair technician and during the previous week I serviced three computers for virus-related troubles. They were each plugged into my home network after I disinfected them. All of them were error-free after I finished working on them, but I am very protective of my network. I spent many hours building it, and many more making sure no one corrupts it. After completing repairs on the three PCs, I was checking the created and modified dates on files on each of my workstations. I gave my girlfriend an old computer of mine a year and a half ago (a P2 400 W98SE); I set it up for her, kept it running lean and clean, and never once found any anomalies in my routine network maintenance. However, on this night, her computer displayed a modified file date of 2037 on her sent items.dbx file. Since emails are a notorious, tried and true path for virus infection, I immediately grew curious. Her email client (Outlook Express 6) was password protected, and I wanted to see if any suspect email attachments existed in that dbx file. I copied the suspect dbx file: (\WINDOWS\ApplicationData\Identities\{AC228580-7D44-11D6- 8CF5-D78FCE200233}\Microsoft\OutlookExpress\Sent Items.dbx) to my PC. (For those of you who don't know, this is where OE stores your emails, in files *.dbx, one dbx file for each folder you create in your respective identit(y) or (ies).) I opened it with a disassembly program (W32Dasm V8.93) and I didn t find any suspect attachments. However, amidst the gibberish of random characters, I saw an email that my girl sent earlier that day to a name I immediately recognized as trouble. It was an ex-boyfriend. The message was very concise, six words to be exact. She asked him, "Are we still on for tomorrow?" This freaked me out, because the tomorrow she spoke of was just hours away. I was supposed to go out on a service call for the day and she was planning to spend it with an ex-boyfriend. I extracted all of the emails from that file with (DBXtract V 3.50) and was absolutely floored. Before my eyes, in forensic black and white, was the outline of 18 months of betrayal. Times, dates, graphic reflections on the sex acts she committed, outpourings of emotion to men I was assured were "just friends." All of it was in front of me, taunting me, sickening me, destroying me. In the midst of making sure her computer was running at its best, so concerned with the performance of the computer I gave her, working into the wee morning hours so that she can painlessly experience the joys of computing, I got violated to such a degree I still struggle to describe it. I copied all of the dbx files from her identity folder to my PC (oh yes, that OE password protection was so helpful to her huh?). I set up a new "dummy" identity in OE6 on my PC and imported all of her emails into it. I took all of the emails and put them into one folder. I sorted the whole stinking mess chronologically and gave myself a timeline to look at. I went down the list and read all of the emails (about 400) and took notes on the dates and times that stuck out in my mind, some dates where I was out of town, other dates where she convinced me she was working late or going out with her "girlfriends." Can you say, "Deleted Items; wow they re still there! Thank you, Microsoft!"? I started searching the cookies on her PC within the parameters of the dates and times I was able to map out from reading the emails, and I found even more evidence of her infidelities. The cookies from MapQuest and Google were especially revealing. By simply opening these cookies in Notepad, I had before me addresses that she got directions to, searches for restaurants and nightclubs, movie showtimes, even lingerie browsing at Fredericks.com! All of it beautifully time-stamped, frozen tracks of her lies and deceit. I tell you it was enough to make me crazy with rage. But I wasn't through yet. At this point, with everything I was thus far able to uncover, I felt it was all up for grabs. Privacy? Fuck her, she had total freedom and look what she did with it. I found enough in the digital world. Now it was time to go "analog." I went into her cell phone records. She meticulously filed each monthly bill away in a folder. I, in a manner quite similar to her precise filing, painstakingly entered all of these phone calls into a spreadsheet in Excel (almost two years worth). When I finished, I sorted these by phone number. Boom, an easy to read detail of who she called and when. I took these telephone numbers and typed them into Google. Voilą! The address of record on these "unknown" phone numbers corresponded to the address searches from the MapQuest cookies. How about her bank statements? In the same file cabinet, not far from her cell phone folder, was the BankOne file folder. I cross-referenced the suspected rendezvous dates against this folder of info and again, voilą! Black and white records of ATM transactions at ATMs very close in proximity to the addresses I found in the cookies from MapQuest and Google. These also fit right into the cell phone records' timeline, some phone calls were made to these other men within minutes of using the ATM! Talk about being busted! A bomb burst in my chest that night. I medicated myself with 13 beers and a pile of cocaine while I reread the comprehensive, chronological, revolting realities of the double life my woman led. It was sickening, like it was two different people. Confronting her with this evidence has been the most difficult task of my adult life. At times I wish I never knew anything about what she did behind my back. I've always been an advocate of total privacy for the individual, privacy free from the prying eyes of those with higher powers. Being able to find out so much detail about my girlfriend from her PC gave me a wake-up call. The things she did were indeed terrible; they managed to hurt me immensely. But look at how easily I was able to construct a virtual "play-by-play" of 18 months of her life. This is what shocks me even more than the awful things she did. As "hackers," we all need to be aware of the digital "footprints" we leave behind while we traverse the world we call "cyberspace." It is a place full of so much information, a world full of the knowledge we love to collect pieces of. It is also a place of danger, for the trails we leave behind us can be collected and analyzed. These trails can be used against us, by powers much larger than any one of us. As the years march forward, we will have to evade, in order to survive.