Spyware

[ORAC]

Maybe I am being paranoid.

If you go to the Gibson site at grc.com you can follow the links to lavasoft and download their ad-aware programme. This detects spyware loaded onto your machine at web sites which then pass information on you and your machine/web site visits back to the site. It has a list of known spyware.

Now the bad news - I found 2 spyware cookies on my machine yesterday. I deleted them, logged on - clean. Came straight to pprune, checked again - back.

The cookies are:
administrator@doubleclick[1].txt
administrator@valueclick[2].txt

If someone can explain the purpose of these cookies and the implications I would be grateful. I am obviously picking them up either from the ISP I am using or here.

I would recommend the grc site for this link and his own patchwork file which locates known trojan files used to hijack/control your machine remotely.

[This message has been edited by ORAC (edited 13 April 2001).]

[PPRuNe Dispatcher]

These cookies are used by doubleclick.com and valueclick.com to target you with specific advertising when you go to a site which contains their adverts. See http://www.cookiecentral.com/content.phtml?area=4&id=10 for more info.

From the lavasoft.de website :

Are cookies dangerous?
A: The answer is no.
A cookie is a pure textfile, and can never contain any exe files or viruses.
Only the webserver that has created the cookie can get it in return. It is impossible for anybody else that does not have actual access to your computer to snoop around among your cookies and therefore see which sites you have visited.

However, some cookies do assign you a unique identifier, that means you will be identified when you return to the website. Some personally (i.e. Doubleclick) - some not.