Cookie Naming Convention

Hi, my cookies are being named some kind of encrypted type.

ie: WNGTBJW1.txt

Using IE8

They are not recognizable. Is there a setting that has changed recently?

TIA, Dennis
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Microsoft changed the cookie file names to a random generated letters as
part of the last security update which was issued in August.

Buckeye9

 

That's a good thing. As I recall, Java[script] cannot list the files in
a folder but ActiveX components can (with which you can use Javascript;
http://ns7.webmasters.com/caspdoc/html/jscript_filesystemobject_object.htm).
Some web page could look at the cookies names to determine where you
were before you visited their site. Since the domain names were in the
cookie .txt files, it was easy for a site to see that you had previously
visited eBay, PayPal, which banks, which credit card issuer sites, your
hospital, your insurer's site, your real estate agent's site, or
wherever else you went within that IE session (and other IE sessions if
you do not configure IE to purge its TIF file on exit). They can
compile a whole history of where you surfed before by looking at the
filenames for the cookie .txt files. Now they'll just see garbage and
have to use other means of drilling out your web navigation history.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS11-057.mspx

Although not mentioned in this security update, other users (e.g.,
http://securitygarden.blogspot.com/2011/08/microsoft-update-impacts-winpatrol.html)
have confirmed that cookie naming got randomized after this update was
installed.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ieinternals...-changes-file-protocol-and-cookie-naming.aspx

This mentions the cookie renaming got added to IE9. Apparently
Microsoft decided to migrate this security feature to prior versions of
IE, too.

 

Got it, thanx for the replys.

I write my own utility that removes just the cookies I dont want. So instead
of interegating the file name I just read each file into a string and search
the said string for criteria. Surprisingly it's not using anymore cpu time
than what I did with the file names.

Dennis
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