76% of Web Users Affected By Browser History Stealing

An anonymous reader writes "Web browser history detection with the CSS:visited trick has been known for the last ten years, but recently published research suggests that the problem is bigger than previously thought. A study of 243,068 users found that 76% of them were vulnerable to history detection by malicious websites. Newer browsers such as Safari and Chrome were even more affected, with 82% and 94% of users vulnerable. An average of 63 visited locations were detected per user, and for the top 10% of users the tests found over 150 visited sites. The website has a summary of the findings; the full paper (PDF) is available as well."

Comments

English as Second Language

[rueger]

Hey Taco! "Vulnerable" and "Affected by" are not synonyms.

Re:If you didn't want your browser history detecte

[Nadaka]

People generally use the same or similar usernames and passwords for most of their online identities. If you you know someone in particular uses facebook.com, hotmail.com, kittenwar.com and randombank.com you can use facebook and kittenwar as attack vectors against their email and banks. Alone, history sniffing does not present a huge threat. But it can dramatically increase someones vulnerability to identity theft.