(copied verbatim from another forum I go to, it's actually now 6)

Okay, it's 5:30 right now (yay for insomnia), so while I'm trying to make this crystal clear it might not actually end up that way. Earlier today/last night I inadvertently invited a person by the screen name of Elul21 to my AIM chatroom. He went ghetto-fabulous on us and got booted from the room. He came back in and challenged me to "IM him again, see what happens". So, naturally I did. When he came back he went even more ballistic and let out a stream of pseudo-insults, I (laughing, the guy was ridiculous) gave several sarcastic comments back and generally made a fool out of him. He warned me not to mess with him, to ask around. I did so and relayed the results (a bunch of "who the flooping 'eck is that?"s, I dont know what he expect. The entire population of AIM isn't exactly one tight-knit community). He flew off the handle, told me that he was going to "f*ck my cabbage up", and shaboom. I'm kicked off AIM with a message saying that I was logged on at two different locations. I finally get back on, and he had deleted my buddy list, as well as renaming the groups into colorful ebonic profanities. Oh, and he claimed that he had saved by buddy list to his computer.

Thus, my questions to you are: Can I recover the account? What about the buddy list? Is there anyway I can "get revenge?" How'd he do it? and of course how much of a security risk do I have?

It's not really a huge deal if I lose the account, it's just that I was fond of it and I'll lose contact with quite a few people on my buddy list. Oh and I guess I'd like to spite the elul person.

Anyone interested? I'm not wearing a shirt as I post this, if that's any motivation. It should be. I mean, <- shabam!

There are a number of known AIM exploits that allow someone to remotely kick you off the service, and if your password isn't decent strength he could have broken in simply by guessing it or running a dictionary hack on it. There may also be exploits allowing him to just connect as you; I'm not sure, AIM vulnerabilities not being my strongpoint (I don't use the AIM client, and barely use the AIM network).
Basically, you met a script kiddie and he ran a couple of his scripts on you to look intelligent.
It may be worth looking in your AOL mail account to see if it still has your contacts there; again, I'm not entirely sure how the different AOL services link together.
Keeping backups of your buddy list next time might be a cunning plan if they're not still around somewhere else.

I have a backup, it's just oooooooooooold.

And I realize he didn't do anything that fancy, I was hoping that someone else could do something not fancy to help me get some leverage back ):


Gah @.@ AIM is so insecure, but it's what everyone uses so *shrug*

He's deleted your buddy list; if you can't recover a backup or something there's nothing you can do to get it back from him (I seriously doubt he has actually bothered to keep your buddy list). Depending on how he's got into your account, you may be able to get it back by just changing the password to something more secure, but if he's got an exploit that gets around that rather than just brute-forcing your password that probably won't help.

In my experience, MSNM is more popular than AIM.