Web bug reveals browsing history

[Camy]

Porn sites are among the top users of a browser bug that reveals all the places people go online, finds research.

Carried out by computer science researchers at UC San Diego the study found 485 sites exploiting the bug.

The flaw gives sites access to all the other sites that user has visited. Many use it to target ads or see if users are patronising rivals.

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The researchers pointed out that some modern browsers, such as Chrome and Safari, are not vulnerable to history hijacking and that the most recent version of Mozilla has closed the loophole. Users of Internet Explorer can defeat the bug by turning on "private browsing".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11899092

[Bruin Fisher]

Thanks for this heads-up.

So all of us using Chrome, Safari, Firefox etc have our privacy protected. And still the majority of web browsing is done using Internet Explorer.

[The Pecman]

Yep, that's true: IE still has 47% of the market, according to Wikipedia. In fairness to them, IE8 and IE9 fixed a lot of these security bugs, and it's not as big a deal as it used to be.

The problem is the number of people still using 10-year-old computers and XP. They work, but they're not real safe.