Comments on: SpyPig: another annoyance against your privacy

By: isilanes

isilanes — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 08:57:57 +0000

What you say is right, Tarun, but your conclusion is not. The tool (unfortunately) is useful (if it works, which according to you seems not to do. I haven’t tried), because there are so many Children of Windows out there, who by default load images and interpret HTML in their images, browse the internet with java fully enabled and so on…

Malware is made for the unconscious masses, and its victims are usually guilty of their own fate.

By: tarun1026

tarun1026 — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 05:17:13 +0000

By the way I tested this stuff personally couple of times, sending email to myself with embedded images through spypig , I got no notification till date. Tried out 3 times.

Even if it works, one can disable it by choosing not to load images in the email. Its a useless tech if you ask me.

I have also covered it here.
http://www.techbanyan.com/archives/138

By: isilanes

isilanes — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 19:27:39 +0000

Thanks for your comment, Super Coco. I would be surprised if the technique were not old, given how easy it is to implement.

By: Super Coco

Super Coco — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 19:20:42 +0000

Mmm. It looks that my wordpress.com profile has been taken, but the previous comment is from me, Super Coco :-)

By: jamacuco

jamacuco — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 19:16:54 +0000

That technique to spy whether your e-mails are read using a small image embedded in the HTML code of the e-mail is quite old, afaik. At least I know about it since some years ago. It is well described in the WikiPedia article for E-mail tracking. Nevertheless, I believe that those techniques are quite ineffective nowadays due to the fact that most modern e-mail clients no longer download images to protect your privacy. That feature was introduced just for this reason.