What is a cookie-A cookie,also known as a web cookie, browser cookie, and HTTP cookie, is a piece of text stored by a user's web browser. A cookie can be used for authentication, storing site preferences, shopping cart contents, the identifier for a server-based session.
Most of us use free email services like yahoo mail, g-mail, hotmail . We use facebook, orkut, and myspace. When we are using these services on Home PC or on Office computers we don't log-out. and this login can work for 2 weeks or more you set in your preferences or minimum a site accept. I never log-out yahoo and facebook, because i need to open them several times in a day. Do you know how this work- If you choose "keep me log-in" website leaves a cookie that will expire when you log out or after maximum time you set in your preferences. Server assignes unique cookies to you. When you make a request to the server using those cookies, the server knows that he is who he pretends to be and allows him to access personal data. Some of them do not encrypt their traffic and you know HTTP is a clear text protocol and anything sent in the network using HTTP can be sniffed and interpreted. So in a LAN a hacker can steal your cookies using a sniffing tool and use them in his own browser for identification purpose, I am not saying that every site's cookie can be used for identification but most of them can be sniffed and used. Well after reading this article if you are worried about your email service, need not because most of them now using HTTPS . So you need to take care of all your logins. This attack can be done in this way
Make yourself Man-in-the-middle:- Sniff packets from the network destined for tcp port 80Extract HTTP payload and search for website specific cookies (Y, B, T)
Create a new Firefox profile named after the IP address of the originator
Create the cookies.txt file in the newly created profile’s folder
Start a new instance of Firefox with the new profile
Enter directly into the website session of the ‘poor guy’
precaution- before leaving your computer if possible clear cookies, it has one more benefit if you forget to logout any site , You will be logged out after deleting cookies. This gives one more benefit to webmasters or new bloggers , after deleting cookies you can click on your own website ads and advertising company will not detect it as a fraudlent click , because their systems are also based on cookies. In firefox if you want to remove only one site cookies , you can but in chrome or in safari the process is difficult. The other attacks are cookiemonster attack or session hijacking can be done with cookie stealing or can be used to make you a zombie for ddos attack.
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