Cookie Question on public computers.

Discussion in 'other security issues & news' started by AnthonyG, Jun 8, 2006.

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  1. AnthonyG

    AnthonyG Registered Member

    Joined:
    Aug 3, 2004
    Posts:
    617
    I was just wondering something that haw cropped up today that has made me very curious.

    If i have my very own XP profile login account on a lan system in my university. And i would like to know if i am browsing a site that uses cookies to acknowlege my return (i.e Rapidshare Premium accounts).

    Does the cookie when it is saved. Get saved on the machine i was logged onto. Or just my XP account and nobody elses. Or does it get saved to the entire system for everyone to use.

    I ask this as in the last two hours 2 Gigs of my Rapidshare accout space has gone and it now says i have -30mb for my daily allocation. Before this i had over 2 gigs for today.

    I checked my account it is saying over 2 gigs was just downloaded from my Rapidshare account and it is saying it is from my Universities IP that has done the downloading today.

    But the thing is i have not been to university today. Yesterday i logged onto university and downloaded something and it said a cookie was set to allow further downloads. I assumed it would to be just my XP profile it would do this.

    Am i wrong about this and the entire universiy now has access to my premium RS account?.

    I have changed my password to make sure but i am curious as to what the situation with Cookies for both internet explorer and firefox maybe (i have my own Portable Firefox installed onto what i thought was just my account at university).

    Thanks
    Anthony
     
  2. StevieO

    StevieO Registered Member

    Joined:
    Feb 2, 2006
    Posts:
    1,067
    A very good question !

    A friend of mine who sometimes uses the library to check her emails on hotmail said that often when she starts to use it, before logging in, she is inside another persons account and could read all their emails and use that account etc etc, if she wanted to.

    I'm not sure whether the last persons don't log out properly, or if it's a cookie thing ? What happens to cookies etc on public networks like this and yours, i'd like to know too.

    StevieO
     
  3. WSFuser

    WSFuser Registered Member

    Joined:
    Oct 7, 2004
    Posts:
    10,639
    if u use ur own account then cookies will get saved there. same with ur history, cache, autocomplete, my documents, etc.

    of course, maybe ur school lan is different from mine. i mostly use portable firefox and it stay in my documents, the cookies stay with it as well. at my school i dont bother much with IE less i need to get a email that much quicker (portable firefox can be slow to start).
     
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