Thanks, VanguardLH and Saucy for your helpful suggestions. You have both
eased my mind on the dangers of tracking cookies.
I found the option to "scan for tracking cookies" under Scanning Control in
SUPRERAntiSpyware preferences and have unchecked it.
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bobster said:
Every time I do a scan with SUPERAntiSpyware on my XP-SP3 system I get the
following "bad" cookie report:
media.legacy[2].txt
I remove it with SAS but it's always back the next time I run SAS. It
doesn't appear when I run Malwarebytes, MSE or Spybot S&D .
I can't find out much about it on Google or Bing.
Does anyone know what it is or if it is dangerous?
TIA
Cookies are NOT malware. They are just text files. Whether they are used
to track your web navigation depends on the sites that you visit. So don't
visit whatever sites create this cookie if you don't want it. Since cookies
are not malware, whether an anti-malware product reports the cookie depends
either on settings in that security program or if they are trying to bloat
their perceived effectiveness by reporting on something rather than
reporting on real problems.
In SuperAntispyware, disable the option to scan for tracking cookies. All
cookies despite their content *can* be used for tracking. A tire iron can
be used to murder, too.
Any site can create a cookie .txt file. However, only the site whose domain
matches the one recorded inside the cookie can access the contents of that
cookie. So domain A could write a cookie for domain B and if you happen to
visit domain B then it can see the cookie's content which would have stuff
written in it from domain A.
So why not configure your web browser to purge all cookies when you exit
that web browser? You might also want to up the enforcement policy on what
cookies are allowed on your host. How that's done depends on what web
browser(s) you use. There are tons of methods to manage cookies.
You can probably use a text editor to look inside the cookie to see for what
domain it was written for its access. The domain inside the cookie might
for the domain you visit that wrote the cookie (but that's not required).
That would lead you to which site you keep revisiting that creates this
cookie file. Rather than use a text editor and decipher its content, you
could use Nirsoft's IE Cookie Viewer (*if* IE is the web browser that you
use since you didn't mention it).