What You Should Know About History Sniffing
Summary: University of California, San Diego researchers found that dozens of websites were using JavaScript to read visitors' browsing history by checking whether links to specific URLs render as visited (purple) or unvisited (blue). Two California residents sued YouPorn over the technique, and analytics firms Beencounter and Tealium were reported to sell tools that query whether visitors had previously visited up to 50 specific URLs.
Key Takeaway: The technique works because browsers render visited and unvisited links differently, and at the time of writing the fix in Firefox had sat in a bug report for eight years and would not ship until version 4, leaving current Firefox and Internet Explorer users dependent on script blocking.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
- Data Breaches
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