Related papers: Who's Tracking Sensitive Domains?
The Domain Name System (DNS) was created to resolve the IP addresses of the web servers to easily remembered names. When it was initially created, security was not a major concern; nowadays, this lack of inherent security and trust has…
Open access WiFi hotspots are widely deployed in many public places, including restaurants, parks, coffee shops, shopping malls, trains, airports, hotels, and libraries. While these hotspots provide an attractive option to stay connected,…
The Domain Name System (DNS) is a critical service that enables domain names to be converted to IP addresses (or vice versa); consequently, it is generally permitted through enterprise security systems (e.g., firewalls) with little…
Privacy policies are legal documents that describe how a website will collect, use, and distribute a user's data. Unfortunately, such documents are often overly complicated and filled with legal jargon; making it difficult for users to…
Recent studies reveal widespread concern and increasing lack of understanding about how personal data is collected, shared, and used online without consent. This issue is compounded by limited options available for digital citizens to…
This study investigates the mechanisms of Surveillance Capitalism, focusing on personal data transfer during web navigation and searching. Analyzing network traffic reveals how various entities track and harvest digital footprints. The…
Data Mining deals extracting hidden knowledge, unexpected pattern and new rules from large database. Various customized data mining tools have been developed for domain specific applications such as Biomedicine, DNA analysis and…
Data aggregators collect large amount of information about individual users and create detailed online behavioral profiles of individuals. Behavioral profiles benefit users by improving products and services. However, they have also raised…
On the internet, we encounter take-it-or-leave-it choices regarding our privacy on a daily basis. In Europe, online tracking for targeted advertising generally requires the internet users' consent to be lawful. Some websites use a tracking…
A large number of URLs are made public by various platforms for security analysis, archiving, and paste sharing -- such as VirusTotal, URLScan.io, Hybrid Analysis, the Wayback Machine, and RedHunt. These services may unintentionally expose…
Online tracking has become of increasing concern in recent years, however our understanding of its extent to date has been limited to snapshots from web crawls. Previous at-tempts to measure the tracking ecosystem, have been done using…
Nowadays, the users' browsing activity on the Internet is not completely private due to many entities that collect and use such data, either for legitimate or illegal goals. The implications are serious, from a person who exposes…
This work presents a systematic study of navigational tracking, the latest development in the cat-and-mouse game between browsers and online trackers. Navigational tracking allows trackers to 'aggregate users' activities and behaviors…
Modern botnets rely on domain-generation algorithms (DGAs) to build resilient command-and-control infrastructures. Recent works focus on recognizing automatically generated domains (AGDs) from DNS traffic, which potentially allows to…
To protect users' privacy, legislators have regulated the usage of tracking technologies, mandating the acquisition of users' consent before collecting data. Consequently, websites started showing more and more consent management modules --…
Online tracking is a primary concern for Internet users, yet previous research has not found a clear link between the cognitive understanding of tracking and protective actions. We postulate that protective behaviour follows affective…
During the past few years, mostly as a result of the GDPR and the CCPA, websites have started to present users with cookie consent banners. These banners are web forms where the users can state their preference and declare which cookies…
DNS dynamic updates represent an inherently vulnerable mechanism deliberately granting the potential for any host to dynamically modify DNS zone files. Consequently, this feature exposes domains to various security risks such as domain…
The Domain Name System (DNS) is the foundation of a human-usable Internet, responding to client queries for host-names with corresponding IP addresses and records. Traditional DNS is also unencrypted, and leaks user information to network…
We perform a passive measurement study investigating how a Protective DNS service might perform in a Research & Education Network serving hundreds of member institutions. Utilizing freely-available DNS blocklists consisting of domain names…