privacy

What Exactly is Spyware?

Jul 20th

Posted by Heather in privacy

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We’ve written a lot here about how to prevent or get rid of spyware, but it hadn’t dawned on us that some of you might appreciate a basic description of just what spyware is until one reader emailed us with that very question, so here it is, the ugly truth, in brief detail:

Spyware!

Spyware!

Basically, spyware is typically a small software program (or script) written with the single purpose of spying on your computer files and/or keyboard strokes in order to find and steal personal information, such as credit card numbers, login usernames and passwords, trade or business secrets, or any other sensitive information the spyware creator may want to get their hands on.

Most often, spyware gets delivered to you as a parasite attached to some other software or files, such as images, without your knowledge.

It can be hard to determine if a file or program you’ve downloaded from the Internet has spyware attached to it, and harder still to tell if you’ve been infected with spyware. That, mixed with how serious the security risk is to PC’s and workstations, is the main reason we talk about spyware so often here.

And while there is certain anti-spyware software which we endorse here, we really don’t care what software you use as much as we care about urging everyone to use some form of prevention and protection software in addition to a strong Firewall and Anti-Virus.

Image Source: sxc.hu user arinas74

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Pros and Cons of Cookies and How To Get Rid of Them

Feb 12th

Posted by Sean in Internet Safety

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Browser cookies have been around forever, yet few people seem to really understand what they are, how they work and what security or privacy implacations they carry.

I believe that based on the number of questions I get about Cookies from friends in social gatherings, and from people who read a blog posting or article I write from time to time.

Here is a great article on Cookies with everything (and more) the average person needs to know about them. I think the writer’s first language is not English based on the wording, however it’s still an easy read to follow and understand so I felt worthy of offering here.

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How to remove Cookies?

by Tangfeng Chen

What is Cookies?

A cookie is information that a Web site puts on your hard disk so that it can remember something about you at a later time. Typically, a cookie records your preferences when using a particular site. Such information is packaged into a cookie and sent to your Web browser which stores it for further use. The next time you visit the same Web site, your browser will send the cookie recorded information to the Web server. The server can use this information to display you the desired Web pages. So, for example, if you customize web pages, register for services, cookies help to recover your personal information. This may be useful to simplify the process of login your personal information, such as email address, name etc.

Pros and Cons of Cookies

Pros

• Cookies help web sites customize their site for you. The information stored on that cookie can help you track a wish list so you can easily refer these items later. • Cookies retain web site options or preferences information so you don’t have to change these items every time you go back to a web site. • You may browse some advertisements that you find interesting from the web pages cookies retain for you. • Cookies can be used to detect illegal activities on the web that is used to promoting products.

Cons

• Cookies easily expose your privacy. Hardly any of people want to be identified on the web and have their moves tracked. • Cookies indirectly guide marketers to track browsers’ moves and impose advertisements on the web pages. • Your browser and cookies can tell web sites such information: your pc brand and size; pc applied software and hardware; e-mail address or account information. Some web sites may request your identity when you surf their pages. Usually firewalls block this request but if you are not protected, you may easily expose this information.

Cookies can make the browsers enjoy a more convenient experience but if you are concerned about your privacy and potential unwanted disturbance, we remind you to check browser options to turn them off.

How to Remove Cookies?

You can easily remove cookies from being saved on your computer by modifying your Internet Explorer settings. To do this, perform the following steps:

1. Open Internet Explorer. 2. On the Tools menu, select the Internet Options command. 3. On the General tab, in the Browsing History section click the Delete button. Note: The way information is only applied to Internet Explorer 7. 4. In the displayed Delete Browsing History dialog box, select the Delete Cookies button.

Cookies may also save part information on the system registry. This is the reason why, after you have detected the cookies from the system, it is still recommended that you clean your registry using a reliable registry cleaner tool.

Thus we recommend you a reliable registry cleaner tool called registry cleaner tool.It can not only perform an all-around scan of your Windows registry to detect and fix invalid references and incorrect errors, which also helps streamline your pc registry without expensive hardware upgrades. Most importantly, Registry Winner protects your privacy by ensuring all traces of your online Internet especially cookies and computer activities permanently to be erased and unrecoverable on your PC which speeds up system performance and retrieves more hard drive space.

How to remove cookies by Registry Winner?

To remove currently stored cookies from your computer, perform the following steps:

1. Open Registry Winner 2. On the Evidence Cleaner menu, in the Internet Browsing History section, click Cookies When you do this, this tool will perform a system scan and remove all cookies that are stored on your computer. Meanwhile, you could also use Registry Winner to delete some other personal information: Temp Internet Files folder; History(Visited sites);Favorites(Bookmarked sites);Start page and secondary tabs. After you clean up the cookies and other stored Internet Explorer information, your Web site preferences will be lost at last.

About the Author

http://www.registrywinner.com/regwinner.asp?mk=ctf

http://registrywinner.blogspot.com/

http://www.registrywinner.com/go.asp?id=1&mk=ctf

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Think Nobody Is Watching You Right Now?

Nov 20th

Posted by Sean in privacy

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Anonymous v Co$

Image by irrezolut via Flickr

Guess what? Almost every where you go online somebody, if not multiple sources, is tracking you. Most of the time this tracking is innocent enough (meaning not with malicious or illegal intent) and simply being used by site owners to measure their web site performance or advertisers who desire to better understand surfer’s habits.

Still, it can be disconcerting to suddenly realize that while you thought you were all alone in your home and anonymously browsing the web; the truth is you are not really alone or anonymous at all.

So, with that in mind here is some information on taking control of your privacy online.

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Anonymous Internet Surfing – Keeping your Surfing Private

by Jim Rjindael

Some people think that they are on the web they are relatively anonymous internet surfing. I’m afraid nothing could be further from the truth, when you request a web page all the information is passed to your web browser in clear text, your IP address is left in the web server logs and it would be relatively trivial to find out who and were you lived from that information from your ISP.

I’m afraid there’s more, your employer will have a full and exact list of all websites accessed, how long and when they were accessed. I have sat in security meetings with huge charts displayed on the wall with the exact web sites that employees have accessed during the previous month and I can tell you there are some amazing sites! Do these people know they can be traced I suspect not as they certainly wouldn’t be surfing those sort of sites at work if they did.

Anonymous Internet surfing by default simply doesn’t happen but it is possible. The most basic way of protecting your identity is to use an anonymous proxy to hide your IP address when you are surfing. Your communications can still be intercepted as the majority of that web traffic is in the clear but it’s less likely unless someone is deliberately targeting you, the main benefit is that your IP address is not left in the logs of the web servers and your web browsing will remain more private.

This is where many people make a really big mistake, this is what usually happens;

1. User decides they want keep their surfing anonymous 2. They search the internet for information and discover about anonymous proxies 3. They look for a list of free anonymous proxies and find one near them 4. They add the anonymous proxy settings to their internet browser and feel much more secure and private!

Unfortunately as is often true, anything that is free on the internet often comes with a hidden cost. Our privacy seeking internet surfer is indeed now masking their IP address from web servers they visit, all the logs will store the IP address of the proxy server as that is what is actually visiting the web site. The Proxy server is then passing back all the requests back to the user, all the users web traffic now goes through this proxy server.

Of course many hacking groups realise the value of proxy servers for privacy and it is why you’ll often find these lists prepared by hacking groups themselves then carefully allowed to drift out onto the internet by various means. Our hapless surfer may come across one of the many lists which are riddled by hacked servers which have had proxy servers installed onto them (usually without the owners knowledge). These servers specifically are monitored and data logged – you are in fact sending all your web traffic directly to a bunch of criminals or hackers, not such a great idea.

This really happens and more often than you think so please if you are going to use an anonymous proxy, make sure it is legitimate and the owner can be trusted. Don’t just use a free one you found on an internet list – not only will you have a limited anonymous internet surfing capability, you could very well be sending all data to a bunch of Eastern European Identity Thieves.

Of course there are commercial and secure services that can secure your identity and protect your privacy. I use a service which completely encrypts my who data stream with a US Military grade cipher (AES) and then uses a selection of high speed private proxies to make my browsing completely secure and anonymous and also safe from anyone who tries to eavesdrop.

Resources:

Anonymous Surfing

Anonymous Proxies

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