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General discussion

http://Netscape Cookie Monster

Jul 8, 2005 9:47AM PDT

Could anyone suggest a way to deal with this intruder? This intruder occurs when accessing an MSN groups page. My Norton Firewall keeps triggering every time I attempt to open several of the group pages, and once my firewall blocks this threat, the page(s) are disabled. Apparently this intruder attempts to read any existing cookies on your machine for advertising purposes, and can direct an unsuspecting user to possibly malicious web sites.
According to the security report, the Cookie Monster originates from Microsoft's MSN Groups. I have contacted MSN about this, and the best advice they could give me was to disable my firewall, as it is conflicting with some of the features on the MSN groups' pages. I advised them that disabling my firewall was not an option, and I have received no further correspondance from MSN.
This issue is apparently related to older versions of Netscape's browsers, however it appears to have made a crossover to IE. I am using IE6, Windows XP SP2. I have read conflicting opinions on how to treat this issue. The question is, would it be safe to configure my firewall to ignore this threat, and I would just empty out cache/temporary internet files after each session, so there is nothing for this little animal to access.

thanks
JB

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