PRIVATE BROWSING MODE EXPOSED

• PRIVATE BROWSING AIMS TO HELP YOU MAKE SURE THAT YOUR WEB BROWSING ACTIVITIES DON'T LEAVE ANY TRACE ON YOUR OWN COMPUTER.  IT IS VERY IMPORTANT TO NOTE THAT PRIVATE BROWSING IS NOT A TOOL TO KEEP YOU ANONYMOUS FROM WEBSITES OR YOUR ISP, OR FOR EXAMPLE PROTECT YOU FROM ALL KINDS OF SPYWARE APPLICATIONS WHICH USE SOPHISTICATED TECHNIQUES TO INTERCEPT YOUR ONLINE TRAFFIC.  PRIVATE BROWSING IS ONLY ABOUT MAKING SURE THAT FIREFOX DOESN'T STORE ANY DATA WHICH CAN BE USED TO TRACE YOUR ONLINE ACTIVITIES, NO MORE, NO LESS.

• HERE BELOW YOU WILL SEE, HOW YOUR DATA WAS STILL SAVED IN YOUR COMPUTER & ANY ONE CAN STILL TRACE YOU. PRIVATE BROWSING STILL NOT SAFE 100%.

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USING THE COMMAND LINE

• When you enter on a website, you first tell the browser the name of the site you want to visit. To contact that website, the computer needs to find the IP associated with the website name; to do this, it uses a DNS server.

• As you can read the process is very straightforward. As it’s not necessary to get this IP address every time, Windows uses a program (a DNS client) to store this information.

• To test everything first we are going to clear entries in the DNS client.

• Press WinKey + R, type cmd and press Enter to open a command line.

• In the command line type "ipconfig /flushdns" and press Enter.

• You can see the DNS resolver cache using "ipconfig /displaydns".

• Now we are going to open a Chrome window and go to any website using Incognito mode. This is the private mode of Google Chrome. To open a window in this mode press "Ctrl + Shift + N".

• Can you imagine what happens if we close this window and check the DNS cache using "ipconfig /displaydns".

• As we can see Chrome doesn’t remove this information from the DNS cache.

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USING SCRIPT

• You have to copy this to a notepad file :

@echo off

Powershell -noexit "ipconfig /displaydns | select-string 'Record Name' | foreach-object { $_.ToString().Split(' ')[-1]   } | Sort | Out-Gridview"

• As always go to File menu, click Save As…, and give the file a name i.e. “ShowDNSCache.bat”. (Include the quotes to save the file as a BAT file and not a TXT file.)

• We can now easily find that someone has browsed Windows Guides (or any site.)

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