User Guide - Kaspersky Lab

136 Kaspersky Internet Security 7.0
next to it on the list. If you want to remove an exclusion entirely, select it on the
list and click Delete.
11.2. Protection of confidential data
Privacy Control includes a Protection of confidential data module that keeps your
confidential information secure from unauthorized access and transmission.
To enable the modules, select Enable Protection of confidential data in the
Privacy Control settings window (cf. Figure 43).
This module controls the following methods of accessing confidential data:
• Attempt to send personal data.
To send data with this method, malicious code runs a hidden process on
your computer, generally a web browser, such as iexplorer.exe. Since the
firewall always allows the activity of these programs, the appearance of
such a process is nothing to signal of a potential threat. This process
serves as transport for sending any data from your computer via http. The
data are extracted from the corresponding file and are encrypted for
transmission.
• Attempt to access personal data or passwords located in Protected
Storage.
This Microsoft Windows feature stores secret data, such as local
passwords, POP and SMTP e-mail passwords, Internet access
passwords, passwords for automatic login to secure areas of websites,
web data, passwords for Auto-Complete, etc.
This data is entered in the corresponding files of mail clients and
browsers. You generally have the option of saving the data in these input
field. You must select a checkbox to do so. In such a case, Windows
saves the data entered in Protected Storage.
It should be noted that even users who guard against data leaks from
Protected Storage and for that reason do not save passwords and data in
browsers usually save e-mail passwords, since entering them every time
you send or receive e-mail would take too much time. Taking into account
that ISPs often have the save Internet access and e-mail passwords,
retrieving it might provide access both to your inboxes and your Internet
connection.
Data from Protected Storage can be extracted using special spyware and
then be send to hackers. To prevent this, the Protection of confidential
data module notifies you of each attempt to read data from Protected
Storage by an application that is not digitally signed by Microsoft