Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Is there any trace on the computer from private browsing sessions? I read that it can be stored on the RAM, but I am unsure what information would be stored.

  • 2 replies
  • 2 have this problem
  • 24 views
  • Last reply by Chris Ilias

more options

Does private browsing leave any trace on my computer? My computer now has a virus and I believe an employee has been looking at explicit material on-line. I read that information can be stored on the RAM. Is there a way I can see what sites were visited and when?

This happened

Not sure how often

User Agent

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.1.249.1064 Safari/532.5

Does private browsing leave any trace on my computer? My computer now has a virus and I believe an employee has been looking at explicit material on-line. I read that information can be stored on the RAM. Is there a way I can see what sites were visited and when? == This happened == Not sure how often == User Agent == Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.1.249.1064 Safari/532.5

All Replies (2)

more options

According to the Private Browsing - Use Firefox without saving history article, "If you save files to your computer while using Private Browsing, those files will not be deleted when you stop Private Browsing..."" So perhaps the employee downloaded a file, then ran it outside of Firefox.

But RAM should not be a concern.

The best thing to do is to find out which virus you have. Then look at documentation about how that specific virus is known to get installed.

more options

Plugins like Flash and Windows Media Player can also leave traces. WMP uses the IE cache and cookies folders to store data

For Flash you can check the local storage: XP: C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player\ Vista: C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\Macromedia\Flash Player\

Other plugins may have local storage or a cache location as well.