G’day All,
I’ve installed CPF this a.m. and carried out a privacy check from auditmypc.com.
The results are worrying as they not only managed to correctly tell me the following:
Your screen width and height is 1280 and 1024.
ShockWave Flash Plug-in - ShockwaveFlash.ShockwaveFlash is installed
Real Player Plug-in - rmocx.RealPlayer G2 Control is installed
Media Player - MediaPlayer.MediaPlayer.1 is installed
MS Agent 2.0 - Agent.Control.2 is installed
MS DirectAnimation Control - DirectAnimation.DirectAnimationIntegratedMediaControl.1 is installed
but they also showed me the contents of my clipboard, which just happened to be the copy of a previous posting on this forum that I was going to post along with an answer to somone’s query.
How is it possible for the above website to gain access to my clipboard and the rest of the info above? More importantly how do I prevent this.
The privacy check at auditmypc.com has not, categorically, gotten through CPF. The information displayed is done by a bit of javascript running inside the web page that you asked for. That is its sole purpose.
In Internet Explorer, you can click on the VIEW menu and select “View Source” and it will display the HTML code for the web page. If you scroll down towards the bottom third of the code, you should be able to spot where the code is that displays this info. It’s worth noting that this info has been generated ON YOUR PC. It has not come back to you from auditmypc.com, this info has never left your PC, they have just conveniently displayed it for you.
Whilst malware could read the same info and attempt to send it back to someone, as soon as it tries to send it outside of your PC, CPF would pick it up. Simple as that. Some may view the privacy check at auditmypc.com as scare tactics, some may not. I will leave it to you to draw your own conclusions, but when I saw that they think the native XP firewall is adequate, I formed my opinion.
Thanks for another speedy reply Ewen, much appreciated. I admit to being worried by what I saw.
The way they presented the info made it appear it had come from their web site, which makes it look as if they have had access to the information. Seems designed to cause panic and alarm in my opinion, naughty people!
BTW my installation of CPF and AV has been smooth as a baby’s bum so far.
So… (V)
That’s funny, my granddaughter’s bum is as smooth as CPF.
It’s a piece of cake to make a web page that displays the contents of your C: drive, just have a link to “C:” on a button labelled “I AM SO MIGHTY I CAN SEE YOUR C: DRIVE” , or “audit_c_drive.com”. oops.
(:LGH)
ewen
