O
Omar's Howl
A day or so ago, something strange (at least to me) happened; the Temporary
Internet Files folder in my XP Home installation moved from the default
Local Settings \ Temporary Internet Files to Local Setting \ Temp \
Temporary Internet Files. I'm not sure what caused this; no updates were do
recently and no one went into the Internet Properties dialog box and changed
the setting as to where the TIF folder should be pointed to (at the time, it
still said the TIF folder should be in its default location).
The default TIF folder still existed, but all the usual internet "junk" from
IE was being written into the new location. Moreover, a new History and
Cookies folder was created in the Temp directory; all that data was also
being written to those folders instead of the defaults as well. I could
clear the IE cache using the built-in tools, but most of my 3rd-party apps
were useless (except ZA Pro), as they continued to look to and clean the
internet trash in the default (and always empty) folders.
I fixed the issue by making the TIF look at yet another location on the HD,
then resetting back to the default--I might have been able to set back to
the default right away had I tried, but I wanted to see if I could get IE to
work with any location *I* chose, which it did when I selected a new spot on
another HD. Once set back to the default, I could only then go to the
recreated History, Cookies and TIF folders in the Temp directory and delete
them and their recreated index.dat files.
My question is: since I'm fairly certain no one on my end made this change,
can a malicious website do what I encountered, change the storage locations
of TIF, History and Cookies folder?
Internet Files folder in my XP Home installation moved from the default
Local Settings \ Temporary Internet Files to Local Setting \ Temp \
Temporary Internet Files. I'm not sure what caused this; no updates were do
recently and no one went into the Internet Properties dialog box and changed
the setting as to where the TIF folder should be pointed to (at the time, it
still said the TIF folder should be in its default location).
The default TIF folder still existed, but all the usual internet "junk" from
IE was being written into the new location. Moreover, a new History and
Cookies folder was created in the Temp directory; all that data was also
being written to those folders instead of the defaults as well. I could
clear the IE cache using the built-in tools, but most of my 3rd-party apps
were useless (except ZA Pro), as they continued to look to and clean the
internet trash in the default (and always empty) folders.
I fixed the issue by making the TIF look at yet another location on the HD,
then resetting back to the default--I might have been able to set back to
the default right away had I tried, but I wanted to see if I could get IE to
work with any location *I* chose, which it did when I selected a new spot on
another HD. Once set back to the default, I could only then go to the
recreated History, Cookies and TIF folders in the Temp directory and delete
them and their recreated index.dat files.
My question is: since I'm fairly certain no one on my end made this change,
can a malicious website do what I encountered, change the storage locations
of TIF, History and Cookies folder?