Hiding digital footprints and protecting your information from hackers has become a challenge these days, and now there is a new trick up their sleeve that could be used to track you across the internet. Software designer Jonas Strehle has discovered that browser favicons could be the new means to track users online and collect information, including credit card number, name, address, and phone number.
What makes this dangerous is that it can bypass commonly deployed security measures on the internet, such as VPNs, incognito tabs, deleting browser/website cache, etc. Here’s what we know about this new security flaw that could be exploited by hackers to gather information about you.
What are favicons?
Pronounced as fave-icons, these are small icons that represent the branding of a website. For example, Wikipedia has “W” as its favicon, Youtube has its logo as its favicon, and we have our logo as Fossbytes’ favicon. The main purpose of a favicon is to serve as a visual marker and help users navigate to the desired tab when multiple tabs are open.
How can hackers use favicons to track you on internet?
According to Strehle, 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).
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