What's behind the mm256.dat & mm2048.dat
files?
There has been a lot of concern over these two files,
and it's not certain what exactly they do. It appears
that they are part of the browser cache at first, when
a string program was run against them it shows they
have cookie entries. These are not actual cookies in
themselves though. They're usually in the
windows/cookies directory if using IE3, but they have
been known to reside in the 'Temporary Internet
Files' and 'History' folders.
They seem to be updated when a cookie is added to
the cookies directory. As an experiment, I accepted
a cookie from doubleclick.com. I then ran the
unix-like strings utility against these files. strings
prints any text strings in a file. It only found this in
mm2048.dat:
Client UrlCache MMF Ver 3.2
It found a lot of stuff (summarizing my cookies??) in
mm256.dat. For your information, I am including the
cookie sent by doubleclick, and the list of strings I
found in mm256.dat. The top doubleclick cookie is
the last one I received. The others are other
experiments.
Here is what strings reported on mm256.dat:
3d64b51
doubleclick.net/
1468938752
31583413
511722784
29112146
Client UrlCache MMF Ver 3.2
w"f2
cookie:[email protected]/
[email protected]
+"A›…
+"A›
cookie:[email protected]/
dwf@ad_doubleclick.txt
3""6g
3""6
cookie:[email protected]/
dwf@gtplacer3_globaltrack(1).txt
D"12S
D"12
The contents of the mm256.dat file is very strange,
it is apparent they are part of the cache, but I fail to
see why cookies need to be cached anyway.