We have heard about private or incognito browsing. It’s the mode that doesn’t store anything in history. While it does store cookies, but are deleted after the session is exited.
This mode is known as Incognito
browsing in Google Chrome, Private Browsing in Mozilla Firefox, and InPrivate
Browsing in Internet Explorer. Whatever we may want to call it, the mode works
the same in all browsers.
However,
sometimes we might want to go back to a page that you previously opened.
The
question is – can you check your incognito history?
Problem
is, there is no easy way to go back to that page. So all are search queries we
saw is effectively lost. Unless you can Google it up and it shows again. But if
it’s not there on the first page of Google, it’s gone forever.
But we
can still get to know about the websites that have been browsed under the
incognito mode.
Yes,
the private browsing mode has a loophole. You can see the browsing history of
someone using incognito mode but only if you have access to their computer.
Also, they must be using the Windows operating system.
How to See Incognito History
While incognito can protect you
from most prying eyes, it won’t be able to protect you if someone went snooping
into your DNS queries. Since these DNS queries are stored and can be accessed
on a Windows device, you can find out a user’s browsing session’s details.
How DNS
Works:
A DNS server, or Domain Name System server, is a device that records the IP address and their hostnames. So when we enter the name of a website in the browser, the browser will check the DNS server and get the IP address of the site to open it.This entire process of communication between the browser and the DNS server gets recorded on your device – even if we’ve used private browsing. Now if we read the DNS results, it will show the browsing history of your computer. And it’s pretty simple to see the DNS results – we don’t have to be a hacker for this.
How
to test this:
Open a website using incognito
mode. Check the history and you’ll see it’s not present in the history list of
the browser.
- Now click on the Windows icon given on
the bottom left corner.
2.Look for the command prompt. You can
invoke it by typing cmd. Type
ipconfig/displaydns>any location\filename
3.
For example, let’s say you want to save the results in a text file called
kingpin123.txt in D: drive.
4.Type ipconfig/displaydns>D:\kingpin123.txt .Go to the D: drive and you’ll see kingpin123.txt there. Open it and it
will show the website you recently opened that didn’t show up in history.
How to Delete Incognito History
1. Follow
the same steps as above. Open the Command prompt and run it as administrator.
2. In
the command prompt, type ipconfig/flushdns
3. This
will flush all the DNS entries made in the incognito mode.
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