It's ba-ack. Exploit revives slain browser history bug

A Google researcher has resurrected an attack that allows website operators to steal the browsing history of visitors almost a year after all major browser makers introduced changes to close the gaping privacy hole.

Proof-of-concept code recently posted by Google security researcher Michal Zalewski works against the majority of people using the Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Firefox browsers. In an informal test carried out by The Register, the attack was able to list recently visited sites on computers running both Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X. It worked even though all three browser makers have patched their wares to stop them from divulging the addresses of sites visited over the past month or so.

“My proof of concept is fairly crude, and will fail for a minority of readers,” Zalewski wrote. “But in my testing, it offers reliable, high-performance, non-destructive cache inspection that blurs the boundary between :visited and all the 'less interesting' techniques.”