Cookie visibility and theft

…Over the next two movies, we will learn…how to keep cookie data private and secure.…Cookies are not particularly secure by default.…When you set a cookie to be stored in…the user's browser, that cookie data is visible to users.…In fact, in many browsers, a user can simply…go into the browser preferences area and inspect their cookies.…We also already saw that with cross-site scripting attacks, a…hacker can put JavaScript on a page to be executed.…A hacker can write that JavaScript to send…your cookie data to a URL that they control.…And by default, JavaScript has access to all of your cookie data.…

In the last movie, we saw an example of an HTTP…request header, and the cookie information was visible down at the bottom.…Anyone can see that information as the request travels…across the network from the browser to the web server.…So, your cookies can be observed if someone watches the network traffic.…The best advice about working with cookies is…to only put non-sensitive data in those cookies.…For example, user preferences.…