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Internet Explorer and Index.dat files
By Martin English | April 17, 2008
Another one from Ghacks:
The usual way to ensure no one can track your surfing in Internet Explorer is to delete the Temporary Internet Files, cookies and history , right ? Wrong !!
Internet Explorer uses index.dat files to store information even though the information contained in those files are hardly needed (although, apparently, the auto complete feature uses the index.dat file of visited websites).
Even though index.dat files cannot be opened in a text editor, they are easily viewable with the right viewer. One such tool is the Index.dat Suite which is probably the most advanced software that is freely available.
When you first start the Index.dat Suite you are asked to perform a scan of your system for index.dat files. You can speed up the process if you filter the scan by drive. All my applications that produce index.dat files are located on drive C which meant that I only scanned that drive.
The list will be huge. Each user account has index.dat files in the home directory. Most of those are default files if the account is not in use actively with a size of 16,32 or 128 Kilobyte. The interesting files are those of active accounts because they contain data that is viewable (if Internet Explorer is used)
Once the scan finished you can right-click any index.dat file in the list and use the internal viewer to see its contents. The contents depend on the type of index.dat file that you open, you either see a history file, Temporary Internet Cache or cookies.
The suite does not only provide ways to view the contents of the files, it also enables you to clean them effectively. Note that while the files are created anew when Internet Explorer is started again, the previous entries will be gone.
Topics: Microsoft, Productivity, Security, software | No Comments »
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