Cookies per se are not dangerous in and of themselves. They are strings of
text, therefore basically static or inert and not dangerous. They are placed
on your machine by the web servers of the websites you visited. This is by
design.
They can however be used to uniquely identify the website's visitor (that is
*you*) and may contain information about you.
Some anti-spyware will flag cookies that are known to be tracking you. You
may or may not care that there is tracking going on.
So with some anti-spyware programs you can set them to ignore cookies.
Why not just turn off cookies in your browser? This is a solution, but makes
browsing difficult. Interactive websites might not work without your browser
setting cookies.
Another solution is to download a hosts file from the Microsoft Most Valued
Professional website and place it in the C
Windows\System32\drivers\etc
folder (overwriting the blank hosts file already there).
Here's the link to the website:
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm
and a direct link to the hosts file:
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt
It must be renamed from "hosts.txt" to just "hosts" - no file extension -
before being placed in the C
Windows\System32\drivers\etc folder.
Once done, log off then back on and a whole slew of web tracking servers
will never reach your browser. Have a look at the content of the hosts.txt
file to get an idea of the type of domains that place tracking cookies. You
will not miss them. And because these tracking domains are blocked many of
those annoying ads you see in websites won't appear.
Have a nice weekend.
"bobster" <fauxie@bogus.net> wrote in message
news:e#RjQrBrKHA.1800@TK2MSFTNGP02.phx.gbl...
> Every time I do a scan with SUPERAntiSpyware on my XP-SP3 system I get the
> following "bad" cookie report:
>
> media.legacy[2].txt
>
> I remove it with SAS but it's always back the next time I run SAS. It
> doesn't appear when I run Malwarebytes, MSE or Spybot S&D .
>
> I can't find out much about it on Google or Bing.
>
> Does anyone know what it is or if it is dangerous?
>
> TIA
>
>