Does the 'ie snare' cookie run on Vivaldi.

tauhanson

Hi.... I have Vivaldi on both my linux desktop and laptop PC's. They both run Linux Mint v20. My question is..... is the spyware cookie known as 'ie snare' effective at reporting personal data back to iesnare.com using Vivaldi browser or does the fact that it's running on a Linux OS prevent it from accessing personal data files without having to use any form of external blocking device?

//MODEDIT: removed active URL

Pathduck

@tauhanson Hello and Welcome to the Vivaldi Community

I believe you have a basic (but very common) misunderstanding of how tracking cookies work. Cookies cannot access your personal data files. They are usually just a string of letters and numbers used to uniquely identify a specific user across sites. These cookies can be used to track your browsing habits and serve you advertisements related to what they think is your interests - or possibly more malicious purposes - but they cannot access your personal data files.

You also need to be aware of the difference between 1st-party and 3rd-party cookies. 1st-party cookies are usually benign, 3rd-party are the ones used for tracking:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_tracking

Blocking 3rd-party cookies can be done in Vivaldi in Settings > Privacy > Cookies -but is not enabled by default since it might break a small number of sites.

You can also enable the ad+tracker blocking in Vivaldi and the default lists contains rules to block requests to the iesnare.com domain:

The DDG Tracker Radar list contains rules to block some of the scripts.
The EasyPrivacy list (must be enabled first) contains a rule to block all 3rd-party requests: ||iesnare.com^$third-party
The "English (Peter Lowe's List)" (must be enabled first) also contains a rule to block all requests: ||iesnare.com^

My guess is the rules in the DDG list will be sufficient for most users.

I also assume at this point that any sites using the "IEsnare" cookies will have moved on to use other domains, so making the list rules ineffective. But that's the nature of tracker-blocking, it's a constantly moving battle between trackers and list-makers...

In fact any requests to http://iesnare.com/ redirect to https://www.iovation.com/stopfraud which leads me to believe they've moved on from using that domain.

Running on Linux does not give any extra benefit, except the fact that it's a lot less malware being written for Linux. But it's still possible for unwary users to accidentally install malware on a Linux system. Cookies however are not classified as malware, even if some silly "privacy" software seem to think so...

Note to mods: I reported this as spam because user linked to a site blocked by uBlock but I see now it was probably because of auto-linking domains. Just unlink the domain.