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New trick hacker use for hacking

15 February, 2021 - By Bhanu

Nowdays millions of user having privacy concern as priority, when browsing the Internet use VPN or incognito mode in browser for the safety and secure their activities

But this method not safe 100% on the internet world many tools or techniques bypass these protection. The security expert from the International Institute of Cyber Security (IICS) will introduced about the "Supercookie".

"Supercookie" is a tracking cookie but has a more sinister use. Supercookies also have different functionality to a regular cookie, too. With a regular cookie, if you don't want it to follow you around the internet, you can clear your browsing data, your cookies, and more.

In another words a favicons tool to assign a unique identifier to all users of a website, which will allow you to perform a detailed track of all the online activity of the target user. Unlike other similar tools, the identifier assigned by Supercookie is stored almost permanently and persists even if the user switches web browsers, uses incognito mode or VPNs and even despite more aggressive changes such as cache flushing and system restart, web security experts mention.

How favicon used by hackers and track you activity

the method to spy on users online is called a Supercookie. A Supercookie is a cookie type that could be inserted into an HTTP header in most popular browsers to gather information about user’s online movement.

To make it easy for browsers to access the favicons, they are stored in a separate local database on the system, called the favicon cache (F-Cache). This F-cache also stores other information about users, including the websites visited by the user (subdomain, domain, route, URL parameter), the favicon ID, and the time to live (TTL).

When a user visits a URL, the browser checks the F-cache to get the favicon. In case the favicon is not available there, the browser makes a GET request to load the site’s favicon. This request allows the webserver to gather additional information about the user and assign a unique identification number.

How to protect from favicon attack 
Sorry but There is no method right now prevent from this attack. The possible way to protect from this changes in the browsers’ favicon caching behavior, and only browser vendors can do this.