AIM version 6.x (till v7.2) onwards stores the password at the following registry location,
HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareAmerica OnlineAIM6Passwords
AIM PRO version uses the different registry location to store the passwords,
HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareAIMAIMPRO<Account_Name>
Latest version of AIM (v7.5 since v7.3) stores the encrypted username/password in the file ‘aimx.bin’ at following location
[Windows XP]
C:Documents and Settings<user_name>Local SettingsApplication DataAIM[Windows Vista & Windows 7]
C:Users<user_name>AppDataLocalAIM
AIM uses Blowfish encryption algorithm along with Base64 encoding to securely store the login passwords. We will soon write a detailed research article on exposing the password secrets of AIM.
- Launch AIM Password Decryptor on your system
- Next click on ‘Start Recovery’ button and all stored account passwords by AIM (AOL Messenger) will be recovered & displayed as shown in screenshot 1 below.
- By default passwords are not shown for security reasons as it is sensitive data. However you can click on’Show Password’ button at the bottom to view these passwords.
- Finally you can save all recovered password list to HTML file by clicking on ‘Export to HTML’ button respectively
How to use Command Line version?
Here is the typical usage of command line version
AIMPasswordDecryptor.exe “<output_file path>”
Here are some of the examples
//Writes recovered password to text file in current directory
AIMPasswordDecryptor.exe output.txt//Writes recovered password to HTML file in current directory
AIMPasswordDecryptor.exe output.html//Writes recovered password to TEXT file
AIMPasswordDecryptor.exe “c:my testpasslist”
It automatically detects the mode (text or html) by using the extension of the specified file (txt or html). By default (or if no extension is specified) it uses the TEXT mode. For more examples refer to Screenshot 2 below.