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Pop-Ups & Cookies

Pop-Ups

3rd Cookies

Virus & Cookie

N/A

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What Are The Chances of Catching a Virus From a Cookie?

A normal text based cookie cannot be of any danger to your computer or spread any viruses. Whether or not other cookies can be dangerous or spread viruses has to do with whether or not a file is "executable," meaning if it's a program rather than data. UNIX files, for instance, have some combination of the properties "readable," "writable" and "executable." The executable property is necessary to enable a program in a file to do something. If a cookie is not stored in an executable format for that platform, it cannot do something hostile.

Most cookies are not executable, and I have not come across one. In general Cookies are stored as text files and cannot be of danger or pass on viruses. Even if a cookie is executable it cannot automatically spread on a virus unless you execute it. But of course with recent bugs in Internet Explorer 3.0, it will let a site run a application. In theory, if a executable cookie was set with malicious contents, then it is possible that IE3.0 could execute it, then it could affect your computer with a virus.

The maximum contents of a cookie is 4Kb, and the line to delete the contents of a hard-disk is only 18 bytes long, so obviously the virus could do some damage even though it could not be a complete Trojan horse. Please note this is only a theory and I have never seen a cookie that was able to spread a virus, this would be virtually impossible, and would take a great deal of work. This theory is trivial compared to some other very real loopholes in the net. A loophole in ActiveX was demonstrated, and was able to access the underlying file system. There has also been some security problems uncovered in Java.

Basically cookies cannot harm your computer. The general controversy is not what cookies can do to your computer, but what information they can store, and what they can pass on to servers, there is currently a new proposal to limit the features of the cookie protocol, which would give people a greater control over what cookies they can accept and from where.

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What can I do to protect my computer from all of this?

Unfortunately, there is no simple answer. There is no single solution that protects against all threats. The following steps provides an over view of some of the actions you can take and the products we suggest you consider.

Spy-Ware

Run Spy-Ware detection and removal software

Ad-Ware

Run Ad-Ware detection software.

Many free versions (like Ad-aware) can be run to find and remove Ad-Ware that has been installed on your machine. To prevent the installation of Ad-Ware in the first place you need to use a more robust solution.) Like KEL Browser-Vaccine

Pop-up Ads

KEL Browser-Vaccine Run software that detects and refuses to display pop-up ads.

Other threats and solutions

There are numerous other threats to your system, especially when you are on-line. Network Address Translation in your router and a firewall are two of the other tools that can provide protection. Note that both of these can b e difficult to properly setup and use. We recommend you get expert help if you are not an experienced user of these tools.