My computer at work seems to generating a lot of requests to files from o.aolcdn.com. The admins think that I do a lot of browsing. I don't believe I do that much and curious to know how could this be happening.
I know CDN sites are usually used for content delivery, but I am certainly not intending to use the amount of content that is being reported by the Barracuda-based proxy.
Any idea where these requests might be coming from?
It's typical for a single webpage to generate 10 or 20 HTTP requests, or even more. When you factor in all the images, the CSS stylesheets, and AJAX requests generated by Javascript, it isn't unusual.
Web mail windows will also generate periodic AJAX HTTP requests to check for mail updates. I haven't investigated but I would wager that it would also be downloading updated ads from o.aolcdn.com during that time. I haven't been on Aol in forever but if you have chat windows or anything else that periodically updates it might be sending requests that you aren't aware of.
If you are using a browser (e.g., Chrome) that prefetches content then even more can be generated. Also, if you've disabled caching of Web content to prevent being tracked at work, that could be a source of an increased number of requests as your browser needs to refetch data that you saw during your last browsring session.
It's also entirely possible you have a virus or other malware making those requests as well.
