Leaking info on the web - and how to stop it

Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 08 September 2009 06:05

Business IT - Security

A new website called "What the internet knows about you" will alarm some and alert others as it shows in great detail one's web history and explains the amount of information that one can leak while visiting any website.
The site uses CSS-related browser history disclosure vulnerabilities to obtain the data that it shows.

It says that it has built the site in order to illustrate the sorry state of browser security.

The overview of the site points out that it is possible to check whether any given site has been visited, any specific page on a site, or any other dynamic resource.

Thus, not only are browsing habits laid out in the open, a lot of personal information about the user can also be obtained.

The site says that since every browser stores the history of visited pages the leaking of information cannot be avoided.

However, it provides a number of ways to beat this problem, most of them through the use of different Firefox extensions.  There are no comparable fixes for Internet Esplorer or Safari.