When you delete the visited urls and the cache in Internet Explorer after disconnecting your computer from the internet you are safe, right ? Many users think that it is impossible to find out which websites have been visited when they delete the cache and the history. This is not true..
The file index.dat which exists many times on windows xp accounts, to be precise many times for every user, stores visited urls and cookies for instance even though you deleted that information before. Microsoft surely has a good explanation for this, right ? They say it is to speed up Internet Explorer but this sounds somewhat fishy, why would you need for instance the cookies if you have deleted them ?
To find index.dat on your computer you need to do the following (Win xo only). Open any folder, click on tools, folder options. Select view from the tab and uncheck “hide protected operating system files” and make sure “Show hidden files and folders is enabled”. Now search for index.dat and windows will come up with some search results.
It does help to view the file in an normal editor, it won’t show anything. What you need to do to see the list of urls or cookies is to download the sweet little tool Pasco created by Keith Jones. It is a freeware command line utility. Unpack it, copy any of the index.dat files into the bin dir of pasco and fire up the command line mode of windows xp. (Hit Windows key + R, enter cmd and hit enter)
Change to the pasco dir and enter the following command:
pasco index.dat > urls.txt
Pasco creates a text file with all urls that are saved in the index.dat file. You can then view the with every text editor available. The same works with the index.dat that holds the cookies of course.
Ever wanted to know what your kids, husband, wife, friends, co-workers do when they are alone ? Use the index.dat file to find out.
How to remove the index.dat file:
The index.dat file is protected in windows and you will have a hard time deleting it from within.
These data files are used by Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer. You cannot delete a file that is in use by a running program. If you feel you need to delete the file, you will have to shutdown all instances of Explorer and IE. This includes applications that may host the Webbrowser control: Outlook, Messenger, IE, Product Studio, Visual Studio, Help, Windows Media Player, etc. Your best bet is just close everything. When you are left with a desktop and a start menu, you will still need to shutdown Explorer. To cleanly shutdown Explorer: Start->Shutdown->CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+Click ‘Cancel’ (for more info, see this post). You can use Task Manager (CTRL+SHIFT+ESC, File->Run…) at this point to open a command window. You should be able to go delete the index.dat. I have only tried this on XPSP2, but it should work anywhere.
thanks to Jeff for this information
Another way would be to boot either into safemode or dos to kill the file.
The new Internet Explorer 7 apparently fixes this issue.
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Whacking a link to batchfile with the content
“”
del /f /q “C:\Documents …\…\index.dat”
“”"
into the StartUp Startmenu group. That should do the job. If not the link is executed to late, then try putting a reference to the batch file in to the Registry “Run” section, where it seems to be reliably executed before Explorer.exe etc. start. Specify in the shortcut to the batchfile a “minimized” execution for speed.
Thus privacy is restored whenever the system re-starts.
A modification on the theme is, eg., to replace the cookies dat file with an appropriate one
Like not working. I found it at http://www.foundstone.com/index.htm?subnav=resources/navigation.htm&subcontent=/resources/freetools.htm
Interesting article
my link is working ;)
Thanks a lot > :)
You cold always jsut use CCleaner.
http://ccleaner.com
On the last statement:
‘The new Internet Explorer 7 apparently fixes this issue.’
Beware! Index.dat files are now inactive and not generated with Explorer 7. Big Brother just came up with something better and more clever, and of course, he is not giving up. It will only be a matter of time until the new system is discovered, made public, and (hopefully) with solutions for deletion.
what about Macintosh Computer and Firefox browser. Is there an equivalent of the index. dat file? Can you retrieve cleared URLs?
Microsoft is so desperate to keep you away from Index.dat files that they keeps moving the goalposts via service packs and new versions of windows so what worked yesterday, won’t work today.
Some of the ‘Special Hidden’ folders won’t show even when you use a registry hack and killing processes ‘Explorer’ and ‘IExplorer’ before you try to delete them still won’t unlock the files on Windows 7 X 64 (Build 7600) and running batch files without exposing account names and passwords cannot remove these index.dat files at reboot due to the wrong windows permissions.
One method that might still works is to boot-up in safe mode and then assign yourself administrator rights and then see if you can find the files to delete them
The method I now use is to create a batch file to rename the subfolder below the folder containing the index.bat files and to then only copy the folders back to the original location that don’t contain these Spyware files but the resultant batch files needs to be run from a separate windows account that has full administrator permissions.
Click my name to learn more and to view the source code to do the job.