IT Baseline Protection Manual - The Information Warfare Site

Safeguard Catalogue - Communications Remarks
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These files are particularly sensitive on proxy-servers, because on such
servers, every external WWW-access attempt by all staff is logged, including
the IP number of the client which started access and the requested URL.
Therefore, a badly administrated proxy-server can lead to severe violations of
data protection regulations.
Most browsers gather a lot of information on users and their utilisation
profiles: Firstly, users might not want these details to be disclosed, and
secondly, superfluous information of this nature can block the available
storage space on the computer. These data include:
- Favourites
- WWW pages which have been invoked
- News-server visits (see below)
- History database (see below)
- URL list (list of the last URLs which have been called)
- Cookie list
- Information on users who are stored in the browser and whose details
might be forwarded (see below)
- Information in the cache (see below)
Information on news-server visits
Most browsers are able to directly access news servers.
In this process, Netscape notes the sequential numbers of the news items
which have been read. This allows the determination of user profiles which
also indicate the newsgroups and news items accessed by a user.
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer goes a step further and stores the entire contents
of all accessed news items.
History database
The history database of the Internet Explorer contains a complete collection of
all activities performed with this browser, i.e. details on pictures which have
been viewed, addresses, internal confidential documents which have been
read, etc.
As a result, the history database quickly takes up a lot of storage space, so that
it needs to be cleared on a regular basis. The files in the history database
should not simply be deleted; instead, they should be replaced by prepared
copies of an empty history database, as certain entries need to be retained.
Information on users
Browsers also store, and sometimes forward, various details concerning users,
e.g. real name, e-mail address, organisation. To prevent flooding by e-mail
advertisements, it is advisable to use the browser under an alias name.
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IT-Baseline Protection Manual: Oktober 2000