Checking where a cookie came from

[bmresearch]

I am researching the Bad Flash Cookies where advertisers attach them to watch what sites you go to. My question is how to open a cookie to see who is placing the cookie? Let's just say for instance a report was done on a website and this is what they found;
website hacked the computers of consumers’ computers to plant rogue, cookie-like tracking code on users’ computers. With this tracking code, website circumvented users’ browser controls for managing web privacy and security.

How can you look at your cookie log and see what website is doing this?

[djr33]

First, the thread you replied to is 4 years old. Due to this, I'm going to split it into a new topic.


What you are asking cannot be done. The cookie stores very limited data: a domain, a name, a value, and potentially other information like expiration date, directory, whether it's only for https (secure) connections, etc.
But none of that will show anything about "where" it came from except the domain.

If you simply view your cookies in any browser, you can easily connect the domain to the name/value pair, but this will apply to ANY cookie from that domain. It will mix the "valid" cookies with the "invalid" cookies, however you define that. If from flash, it will still say the same domain.

It might be possible to somehow record how these cookies are submitted while your computer is receiving them and to create a log, but if the object is acting like part of a domain, the cookie will act as part of that domain as well. This is why it is important to not allow foreign code such as Javascript on pages that you don't monitor: for example, in a forum post a user could create code that would steal every other user's cookies from the site, but only if the forum software didn't block Javascript in posts-- most do, and it's a mistake not to.