Cybersecurity

Your (Not So) Private Browsing With Microsoft Edge

This last summer Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was superseded by the shiny and new Microsoft Edge browser, and everyone rejoiced. The aging IE, fraught with security vulnerabilities, clunky interface, and outdated technologies was long reviled in the tech community as a source of headaches and as a security nightmare.

Edge came out with a new list of long-awaited features, among them Microsoft’s own Cortana Assistant, and features that have already become nearly standard, like Reading List or a private browsing mode, InPrivate.

Unfortunately, it appears the new privacy feature may not be so private after all. According to research by security expert Ashish Singh, it is almost trivial to recover websites visited in InPrivate mode from a user’s hard drive. All one has to do is examine the WebCache file, from which an attacker could reconstruct a user’s entire browsing history. “The not-so-private browsing featured by Edge makes its very purpose seem to fail,” Singh wrote in Forensic Focus.