The Cocoon Blog
The Internet as it should be: private, secure and virus free

There is an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) today about how Google and Apple collect and store information from personal computers and mobile devices. Apple allegedly gathers information from Macs that are connected to WiFi networks while Google collects information from WiFi connected computers that use the Google Chrome browser (or the Google toolbar for Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox.)

The WSJ states that in most cases the companies request user permission prior to gathering information about users’ wireless networks and nearby networks. It is unclear what the term “most cases” actually means.

Both companies use computer-location data to build highly precise databases of Wi-Fi networks, which they use, in turn, to locate phones and computers attached to those networks.

Purportedly, all of this high-tech surveillance can also be used to enhance the user experience when you visit places like Google Maps. Though there may be an entire generation of users who find targeted marketing appropriate for their lifestyle, there is also a generation that feels inundated by the complexity of it all…

For the generation that prefers privacy over targeted marketing, there is Cocoon.

Last week a friend was searching Google images and with just one click on the wrong image, he was redirected to a malicious domain. Upon arrival at the malicious domain, a Java executable promptly downloaded, executed and immediately connected to a rogue IP address. One click on a rogue image was all it took for my friend to become automatically infected via a drive-by-download.

A drive-by-download is a program that is automatically downloaded to your computer without your consent.

Typical drive-by-download (URLWriteFileToDisk)

1-Browser loads the URL
2-Browser executes the exploit code
3-Next, browser executes the shellcode
4-The shellcode downloads malware to disk
5-Shellcode executes malware

Softpedia

Search result poisoning attacks are relatively common, but the vast majority of them are used to spread fake antivirus products, commonly referred to as scareware.

The Cocoon Solution

With Cocoon we make it simple. When you connect to the Web with Cocoon, the pipeline runs from the Cocoon servers to the web and not from your computer to the web. Cocoon enables you to browse securely, prevents automatic drive-by-downloads and is malware-free.

If you would like to learn more about how Cocoon can protect you, please visit us today!   You can also use our handy contact form or join us on Twitter or Facebook!

It’s a beautiful spring day and you just sat down at your desk with a fresh cup of hot coffee. You can’t wait to check out the latest news feeds to see what has happened since last night. You feel that you are going to get a lot accomplished today, maybe even have some time to chat on Facebook later.

While you are perusing news feeds your son calls from college and asks for your help in locating a really cool picture of Mussolini. He has an important presentation that he has to give tomorrow.

You mosey over to Google images and begin your search. As you scroll through the images one picture in particular grabs your attention. Ah that is such a striking picture! You click on Mussolini and instantly a script connects to IP 69.50.xxx.xxx TCP port 8000 and downloads malware to your computer. You have just suffered a common malware attack!

Wikipedia defines Malware as, short for malicious software, is a software designed to harm or secretly access a computer system without the owner’s informed consent.

Malware includes computer viruses, worms, trojan horses, spyware, dishonest adware, scareware, crimeware, most rootkits, and other malicious and unwanted software or program.

Malware removal can be an expensive and time consuming process. Once a system is compromised there is no guarantee that the system can be returned to a 100% pre-malware state.

Now there is Cocoon

Cocoon prevents automatic drive-by-downloads, prevents you from being tricked into manually downloading malware and protects against web-based attacks because it blocks malware before it makes it to your computer.  You still see the whole Web with crystal clarity, but you aren’t connected directly to it. Malware can’t get to your computer, ever.

Stay tuned for Part Five (next week) of Get the W-Rap on Cocoon.  If you don’t want to miss the latest news please subscribe to our RSS feed.

Yahoo Inc. was all over the news yesterday when they announced that they would be upping data retention search engine queries from three to 18 months. Yahoo will soon mimic privacy policies that sync with Bing (Bing powers Yahoo Search) and Google data retention time frames.

The Los Angeles Times reported:

Yahoo said Monday that the decision was made to keep pace with online competitors.

“Over the past several years it’s clear that the Internet has changed, our business has changed, and the competitive landscape has changed,” Anne Toth, a policy executive at Yahoo, wrote in a blog post. “We have gone back to the drawing board to ensure that our policies will support the innovative products we want to deliver for our consumers.”

It was also Toth who, in December 2008, said that keeping the data for only three months would set Yahoo apart from its competitors and build trust with the company’s users.

The Yahoo “building trust with the company’s users” will soon be replaced by “the innovative products we want to deliver to our consumers.”

There are other options…

Our preferred search engine of choice is DuckDuckGo.com because they do not track you and their privacy policy is simple.

Also, like anyone else, we will comply with court ordered legal requests. However, in our case, we don’t expect any because there is nothing useful to give them since we don’t collect any personal information.

Our privacy policy is also succinct and to the point and we are very proud of it!

Our business is to protect your privacy. We do not share your data with anyone unless required by law. Your data belongs to you.  Only you have the key to decrypt your data. If you close your account, no trace of your data is left on our systems.

Privacy + simplicity, minus complexity = the Internet as it should be.

Stay tuned for more Get the W-Rap on Cocoon next week!

Product updates are part of our ongoing plan to offer Cocoon users the best in Internet security, privacy and enhanced features to complement a seamless browsing experience.  Your window to the Internet just got better!

What did we change?

If you click on the Settings icon on the main Cocoon toolbar

you will be presented with a new Settings toolbar that includes access to your history, important bookmarks and notes, mailslots, browsing preferences, support and your account (you can change your password here).

With the new Support tab you can:

• Write support requests, send feedback, and submit bugs
• See responses from Cocoon Support and reply back

With the new My Account tab you can:

• Change your password from within Cocoon
• More to come!

New Bug Fix

We fixed an issue that prevented users from accessing their Yahoo! Mail.

Your feedback is important to us!

As always, the Cocoon™ service acts as a window to the Internet, where our servers and our software do the browsing for you, strip out all the bad stuff, and simply deliver the Internet content you were looking for in the first place.  Please continue to let us know what you think of Cocoon updates. We sincerely appreciate your feedback as we continue to offer ongoing enhancements and look to our users to gauge progress in this area.

If there is more that you would like to see changed or added, we would love to hear from you!   You can use our handy contact form or visit us on Twitter or Facebook!

Virtual World Computing (VWC) was founded in 2008 by primary owner Jeff Bermant and Chief Technology Officer Brian Fox who is the principle inventor of the Cocoon ™ service technology. Jeff initially had a bad experience with a virus that took over his company server and spammed friends and colleagues with approximately 30,000 messages a day. The office was shut down for 2 days – loosing productivity and costing $1500 in service calls to remove the malware.

Jeff had the simple yet powerful idea of protecting his privacy and his computer by accessing the Internet through a browser running on a remote PC. The seed of that idea grew into Virtual World Computing and the Cocoon™ service. Jeff is an entrepreneur by nature. Brian has over 25 years of technology and business experience. In 1995 Brian completed the world’s first Internet banking system for Wells Fargo. He was employee #1 at the Free Software Foundation (Project GNU), where he wrote software, including the BASH shell, widely used in all modern versions of UNIX, (Linux, SunOS, and Mac OS X). Both Brian and Jeff share a belief in personal freedoms & privacy which forms the core of Virtual World Computing and the Cocoon™ service.

Pre-Launch

For approximately six months the Cocoon™ service was in alpha phase. We invited only 20 users to test what it would be like to browse the web privately and securely. The feedback was terrific. We learned much about the controls and features – and most importantly how to communicate these features to our users. People loved the idea of not giving up their identity and IP address.

After two years of work, Cocoon went live with the beta version. During this phase of development it was truly amazing to watch Cocoon filter or transcode each website, wiping away any viruses or malware and do it with no discernible delay.

Official Launch

We went live in January of 2011 with a limited roll-out from beta and to mark the occasion we worked with Lifehacker, a weblog focused on software and personal productivity shortcuts that help you work smarter and save time. We felt Lifehacker readers were perfectly suited to both appreciate Cocoon’s privacy, security and productivity features, and provide us with the feedback and suggestions we needed to continue shaping Cocoon.

In addition to the free launch trial, we let users sign up for Cocoon through Lifehacker for only $3/mo. (regularly $6.95) with a special price that never expires.

That was our history in a nutshell!  Stay tuned for more Get the W-Rap on Cocoon next week!

Spokeo is a social network aggregator web site that aggregates data from many online (publicly accessible) and offline sources (phone directories, government censuses, and real estate listings.)  Spokeo looks for personal activity on social media sites like Amazon and Facebook and integrates the data found with phone books, real estate listings and government data.

Though not always entirely accurate, sometimes a service such as Spokeo can be highly invasive.  A search for my name brought up nine prior addresses and even showed a picture of the house I once lived in (you can view this by clicking on the property tab.)

It is easy to remove your information from Spokeo using Cocoon mailslots

You will need to open two web pages at Spokeo.com The main Spokeo Search page will be used to search listings and the second page will be used to submit the URL that you want removed from Spokeo:

Spokeo Search + Spokeo Privacy page

1. Navigate to Spokeo Search and search for your name. (If you have lived in more than one geographical location do not include the city, state in the initial search box.)
2. After Spokeo returns the search results, click on the city, state where your name is listed and copy the URL from the browser address bar
3. Return to the Spokeo Privacy page and paste the URL that you copied into the Spokeo URL box, drop down to the email field and right-click to select Mailslots and Create new Mailslot  
   
4. Enter the CAPTCHA code and click “Remove Listing”
5. Check your Mailslots and follow the instructions to complete the removal process. The removal process is generally instantaneous.

Spokeo limits the number of privacy requests per email address. To resolve this restriction right-click from the email field and select create a new mailslot.

More information on Cocoon Mailslots:

Why Cocoon mailslots can be a good thing

Mailslots Basics [Video]

Thank you for continuing to use Cocoon and we appreciate your feedback. If there is more that you would like to see changed or added we would love to hear from you.

You can use our handy contact form or visit us on Twitter or Facebook!

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In the news

We’ve come a long way in a very short time, thanks to all of you!  The news started to peculate when Lifehacker posted about our launching back in January of this year, we also had a great review from switched-downloadsquad, and some great links from The Awesomer and a few others. People all around the world started signing up to use Cocoon.

Cocoon has been in the news a lot lately.This month George Jenkins interviewed Brian Fox, our co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at the I’ve Been Mugged blog. Then we were featured at the cnet Download Blog and also at Venturebeat.

From the I’ve Been Mugged Blog:

Cocoon is created by a team of people who strongly believe in the rights of people to use the Web privately and securely. We believe that the Internet is a resource for the world, and not just for a select few. Our mission is to enable access, privacy, and security on the Internet to anyone who desires it. Our feature creation is driven by the needs of our users, and we ensure that there are many ways to communicate with us – even anonymously!

From the cnet Download Blog:

Cocoon looks like a serious contender for one of the best add-ons of the year. It’s a smart and effective tool, easy to toggle on or off, and plugs nearly all of the security holes the average user will encounter.

From VentureBeat:

Imagine browsing the web without having to worry about viruses, spam, and spyware. Imagine you could log in to see your favorite web sites from any location, without being tracked.

Our customers

That means YOU! Your right to privacy and Internet security is important to us. We take your feedback seriously. We want to make the Cocoon experience a safe window into the Internet, protect you from the bad guys and at the same time give you options that are important to you.

(more…)

This week many customers received notifications from their banks, hotel chains or stores alerting them that Epsilon (acquired by Alliance Data in 2004), one of the nations’ largest marketing services had been breached. Along with the names and email addresses that were compromised, came the possibility that the stolen data could be pieced together to create targeted phishing campaigns. Though no sensitive data was stolen, this could very well be the largest data breach in U.S. history.

How Cocoon Mailslots Can Protect Your Email Address

With mailslots, you no longer have to use your personal or business email to gain access to a website that requires registration. You do not have to give your real email address to your bank or department store either. You can also easily change a default email address that you initially created into a mailslot by editing your settings at the site that you registered at. You can conveniently delete mailslots if they  have become the playground of spammers or scammers.

With Cocoon mailslots, you have complete control to:

• edit mailslot nicknames
• activate/deactivate a mailslot
• ability to read, send, and delete messages from the mailslot
• permanently delete a mailslot (if the account gets spammed – never a problem with Cocoon, just delete the mailslot!)

For more information on Cocoon mailslots please visit our FAQ and view our videos on Mailslot Basics and How to Edit a Mailslot.

Thank you for checking out Cocoon, we sincerely appreciate your questions and any feedback that you have to offer. If there is more that you would like to see changed or added, we would love to hear from you!

You can use our handy contact form or visit us on Twitter or Facebook!

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The cnet Download Blog

We are pleased to announce that we were recently featured on the cnet Download Blog: “Wrap Firefox in a Cocoon of privacy.” We would like to thank Editor Seth Rosenblatt for a very thorough walk through on what Cocoon has to offer the world in the realm of Internet security and privacy.

Cocoon looks like a serious contender for one of the best add-ons of the year. It’s a smart and effective tool, easy to toggle on or off, and plugs nearly all of the security holes the average user will encounter.

The I’ve Been Mugged Blog

We are also pleased to announce that Blogger George Jenkins from the I’ve Been Mugged blog recently interviewed Brian Fox, our cofounder and Chief Technology Officer at Virtual  World Computing (VWC) and developer of Cocoon. His blog chronicles his experiences with identity theft, identity fraud, data breaches, and corporate responsibility.