How did a strange username get into my IE7 autocomplete list?

June 13, 2007 10:14 AM

How did a username I've never seen before get into my IE7 autocomplete list?

When I click on the "username" field on a login form in IE7, in addition to my actual usernames for various sites, there appears a name I've never seen or heard of before. I'm absolutely positive I've never searched for it or typed it (it'd be extremely difficult to type accidentally), but it is a plausible username, and to make things weirder, it's a French last name, like my username here (yes, I'm SURE I have never typed it before). I searched my hard drives for files containing this word (thinking it might be in a cookie somewhere), and came up with nothing. The username does not show up in Firefox or Safari.

I'm on Windows XP Pro, and I'm networked to my fiance's computer and my laptop. Neither of those computers have the offending username, either in their hard drives or in their autocomplete lists. No one has used my computer but me. I know my fiance hasn't used it recently, because he's been away on business. Nothing else seems missing or out of place.

Should I be worried that something's been hacked? If so, what should I check for? How else could this happen?

posted by desjardins to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Your fiance needn't have used it recently for the name to be there, you may just not have noticed it? Have you searched google for the name? It may help shed some light on it.
posted by fire&wings at 10:39 AM on June 13, 2007

Have you ever used BugMeNot to get into a site? If the "remember me" box was checked by default, that random login would be saved, and you'd probably not remember it.
posted by donnagirl at 11:12 AM on June 13, 2007

What can happen is that you follow a link somebody posted or e-mailed, where the username is in the link (e.g http://example.com/login.php?user=john.smith&contentpage=thestuffyouwant)
). The website translates the request as if it were drawing from the sender/poster's account. You are prompted for the password, of course you don't know it, and you probably correct it to your own -- but the username itself has already been placed into your browser records.

I wouldn't necessarily worry about it.
posted by dhartung at 12:19 PM on June 13, 2007

Where did you buy your computer? Have you had it serviced? It's possible someone at the shop needed to log in for something, like downloading a patch?
posted by Lord Kinbote at 12:59 PM on June 13, 2007

fire&wings: I use my computer a lot, and I'm fairly certain this has only showed up in the past 24-48 hours. Upon Googling the name, it's a French Catholic saint, and also a French last name. Odd.

donnagirl: No, have never used that.

dhartung: Thanks - I click on stuff from MetaFilter all the time, maybe that did it.

Lord Kinbote: Fiance built it himself.
posted by desjardins at 1:14 PM on June 13, 2007

I hate to be a pessimist, but when that happened to me, it turned out that my girlfriend was cheating on me and the guy had checked his email at my house.
posted by aliasless at 10:10 PM on June 13, 2007

Sorry to raise the alarm (note "paranoia" tag). It was indeed my fiance, who was troubleshooting something for a client on my computer since he doesn't have IE7 on his. He was working from home, I was out of the house, so I didn't even know he'd been in my office. This was weeks ago, so I'm not sure why the name didn't show up until now.
posted by desjardins at 7:09 AM on June 14, 2007