Information gathering, social engineering and security.

[Guest]

Let's share our ideas and experiences on how to gather information from our enemies, and how to protect ourselves.

DISCLAIMER: In this field of the game it is very important to be conscious of what's legal, and what's contrary to the rules of the game and the law. Stealing passwords, cracking, hacking, cheating, multi-accounting are all STRICTLY prohibited; i discourage the abuse of any of these methods, though we can discuss on how to protect ourselve from those!
Passwords are an highly sensible piece of information: common internet security sense is needed. Be carefull also of your email account: people may steal your email account to "retrieve" your game password with the "lost password" service.


What's the point of information gathering in SpaceInvasion?
It's actually very important, especially where you're dealing with big players.
Knowing who is your enemy in the "Real Life" can be a precious data, or even simply being able to tell if he is online or not!


For example internet Forums can be of crucial importance.
First of you usually in the forums you can see at the bottom of the index the Online users: Hey! That's great!
There is the SI official forum, but there is also usually an alliance forum ( like this one, eheh ): dont forget to check it out!

Another sweet thing you can do with the forums is gaining "time patterns and routines".
Search for a user messages, and look at the post hour and at the days of the week, you'll be amused on how much things you can discover.
A very easy and common pattern is the "school" pattern.
With a little patience you can extrapolate very precise routine behaviours of opponents, and strike them accordingly.

Another KEY option for gathering information is Google.
A lot of people is very affectionate to their nicknames: google it... you may find other internet communities in which they are subscribed from whom you can dig more infos. You may discover even something about their Real Life in some social network ( facebook, anyone? ).

In these regards: protect yourselves!
1) Try to gather information about yourself and discover your weak points
2) In all the SI forums, change in the Control Panel your mode to Invisible!

Yahoo! Messenger, MSN, ICQ and mIRC... again... great ways to discover things.
Get an opponent contact may mean you can see when he is at the computer and when he is not.
There are tons of ways to get a contact, some of them are not very "politically correct", but legal indeed: for example use a non-SI-related community in which your target is subscribed ( find those with google and the nickname ) to know him.
Dont pretend being someone else ( stealing identity is one of things you MUST NOT do ), at the limit create yourself another identity.

Well... i've wrote enough for now, anyone knows good ways to gather information or to protect our security: share it!