HttpWebRequest sessionID c# login

Question

Im trying to login to a website (www.vodafone.ie) with a console app and c# httpWebRequest. Problem is it works ok about 50% of the time.

Im using fiddler to find out the GET and POST requests I need to make. Done that and my app is successfully recreating these as best as I can see. The steps are; 1) GET request with cookie container to login uri. server response sets new cookie called jsessionID 2) do POST request with login credentials and same cookie container containing previous jsessionID.

Looking at the fiddler logs for successful POST request login (browser or my app) I see it sets a thing in the response header : "Set-cookie: supercookie=-; Expires=Thu, 01-Jan-1970 00:00:10 GMT; Path=". What is this supercookie thing? Its not returned to me in the response cookie collection like the jsessionID. On rare occasions, there is along string of numbers with the supercookie instead of just "-".

I made sure to clear all cookies before analyzing the request/response headers. If the super cookie thing is not being set in the reponse my login fails. So just wondering what's going on here?

cheers!

Answer 1

supercookie is just a name of another cookie. It's quite possible they are using that to prevent screen scraping. Make sure when you receive that response that the cookie container now holds that new supercookie cookie.