The Great MaFia Wars: PROTECT YOUR FACEBOOK and MAFIA WARS ACCOUNT

Starting sometime in the next few days Zynga is putting their programmers and coders to work overtime and will be scanning all servers for bot and scripts being used. If caught no warning your account will be terminated immediately.
This is not a hoax or even a scare...I can not say that this has come from reliable sources, but I would not doubt it, plus it will happen sometime. bot and auto scripts are against the rules, and Zynga will enforce them sometime. They are claiming that all the scripts being used are what is causing problems with the game servers and that is what is causing delays and screw ups in the game.
They use a tracking cookie (iesnare and mpsnare) that might already be at your machine.

The Dreaded iesnare Cookie Can Get you Banned from Mafia Wars and others Zynga game. First Things First Play in Privacy Don't get banned. As you probably know the fewer sites you allow to install software on your PC, the more productive and safer your browsing will be. The only site you should have in your whitelist for addons installation is addons.mozilla.org (as it happens for an "out of the box" Firefox). Therefore the links below point to trusted downloads on addons.mozilla.org.

You could take these steps if you have the cookie and want it gone!

Basically, iesnare will send mesages YOUR computer instead of THEIR intended website (which means they will be thrown away), make sure you're not being snooped on.

How to disable iesnare?

There are a number of ways of disabling iesnare, each method is listed below in order of simplicity (though the first method isn't much use if you use Flash regularly which most people do nowadays, still by definition it probably is the simplest method of disabling iesnare). You only need to use one method and you should be OK, but if you want to use more than one method then belt+braces isn't such a bad thing.

(Method 1)
Uninstall Flash

One very simple way of blocking flash cookies (ie iesnare) is to just uninstall Flash player completely. In this way the iesnare cannot work because you don't have Flash installed - a little (ok, very little) bit analogous to a stopping a car from working by removing the car and just leaving the battery on the pavement(!). But of course if you need to use the car much then you ain't getting far riding on a battery - in the same way if you use Flash regularly - and who doesn't nowadays when the web is based largely around Flash for many many things - then you won't want to uninstall flash and you should pick a different method from below.

(Method 2)
Disable iesnare by modifying your 'hosts' file

This method works by fooling your PC (and the iesnare software) into believing that the iesnare website is actually hosted on your local machine / PC. This way, any time a connection is attempted to one of the iesnare related sites, the connection is actually made with your own PC (which will fail because you are (probably) not hosting a web server on your machine - and even if you were you will not be running the scripts required to understand what's going on / it will be harmless). This doesn't affect connections to any other sites, just to any of the iesnare related sites. It should also not affect your online activity noticably either (unless of course you visit an iesnare site, in which case the web page will not load!). To achieve this (note originally written on WinXP though methodology is same on Win7):

Log into Windows as Administrator.
Open the 'Run' dialog box (press 'Windows+R' or click 'Start', 'Run').
Type in (or copy): 'notepad.exe C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts' (note replace 'C:' with whatever drive your windows folder is on, most machines it should be just c: ). Hit 'enter' to open up the file in notepad.
At the end of the file, add the following line:
Code:
127.0.0.1 iesnare.com www.iesnare.com mpsnare.iesnare.com ci-mpsnare.iovation.com
Save the file (press 'ctrl-s' or go 'File > Save').

To test whether your changes worked:

Open the 'Run' dialog box (press 'Windows+R' or click 'Start', 'Run').
Type in 'cmd' and hit enter, this brings up the commandline.
Type in: 'ping iesnare.com' - this will try to send a ping packet to the address that your machine thinks is 'iesnare.com'.
Type 'exit' to close the command line window.

If your modifications were successful, you should see 'Pinging iesnare.com [127.0.0.1]' when you run the ping command above. Don't worry if it says 'ping failed' or similar, just the fact that iesnare.com resolves to 127.0.0.1 is enough to know your modifications were successful - this means the iesnare software will think your machine is the iesnare.com websit.

(Method 3)
Disabling iesnare by changing the Flash settings
Another alternative to the methods above is to limit the amount of space that iesnare can use by changing the Flash settings. In this way by setting the available space to zero for iesnare you can effectively stop it from working (because it has nowhere to place it's cookies).

visit this site:
http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager07.html

select mpsnare.iesnare from the list ( thats if its on your pc ) then drag the slider down to 0Kb ,or delete it from the list it wont be able to store a flash cookie on your pc .

(Method 4)
Disable iesnare by blocking read/write access to iesnare cookies on your HDD
This step is slightly more complicated and involves blocking the iesnare flash application from writing the cookies to your HDD in the first place - if it can't read/write the cookies, it cannot function properly.

There are 3 steps to this method, each listed below. The article was originally written for Windows XP, however the methodology is the same on Windows 7:

Step 1:
enable access to the file/folder security properties so you can change the permissions on the folders:
Note: you must have administrative privileges on the machine. The following steps are for Windows XP Service Pack 2/3.

Open Windows Explorer.
Go 'Tools > Folder Options'.
Select the 'View' tab.
In 'Advanced Settings', scroll down to the bottom and make sure 'Use simple file sharing' is NOT ticked.
Click 'OK'.
This allows you access to the security settings for each file/folder which isn't usually displayed by default (presumably to stop people effing up their system beyond recognition).

Step 2:
Deny write access to the iesnare folders:
In Windows XP etc, hit 'Windows-key - F' to open the Search window. (press the windows key and the 'f' key at the same time).

Type in 'mpsnare' in the Search window.
When the search is completed, if iesnare has been used on your machine you'll usually find two or more folders with names like: #mpsnare.iesnare.com, #ci-mpsnare.iovation.com, mpsnare.iesnare.com and ci-mpsnare.iovation.com.
Select all of these folders, right click and select 'Properties'.
Select the 'Security' tab and then in the section where it says 'Permissions for ', click the 'deny' checkbox for each of the permission types (full control, modify, etc) - you can probably get away with just denying write perms though.
Be very careful not to change any other permissions on any other files/folders because this could make your machine unusable.

Step 3:
re-enable 'simple file sharing'
Follow the details in Step 1 above, but make sure the 'use simple file sharing' option IS ticked this time.

(Method 5)
Disabling Flash Objects / iesnare in Firefox using 'Objection'

Objection is an addon for the Firefox web browser which allows you to block local shared objects (LSO) - iesnare being an example of a Flash based LSO.

It works in the same way as the built-in cookie blocker does in Firefox, allowing you to enter fully qualified domain names for which you don't want LSOs to be installed.

Step by step guide not really needed although will add it if someone requests it!

(Optional) Disable iesnare cookies in your web browser

NOTE - this is really an optional extra and shouldn't be needed if you've followed one of the methods above but doesn't hurt to do if you feel like it.

If all that above weren't enough, you should also block any regular HTTP cookies from the domain iesnare.com. These are the cookies that you can control from within your web browser (you can't control Flash cookies by default in your web browser):

Firefox: