HttpWebRequest no accepting cookies C#

Question

I'm having an issue with HttpWebRequest accepting cookies, this is my code:

        HttpWebRequest req= (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("https://www.companyabc.com/security?action=authenticate");
        req.CookieContainer = new CookieContainer();
        req.CookieContainer.Add(new Uri("https://www.companyabc.com"), new CookieCollection());
        string postData = "account_id=xxxx&password=xxxx";
        req.KeepAlive = true;

        byte[] send = Encoding.Default.GetBytes(postData);
        req.Method = "POST";
        req.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
        req.ContentLength = send.Length;

        Stream sout = req.GetRequestStream();
        sout.Write(send, 0, send.Length);
        sout.Flush();
        sout.Close();

The response I'm getting is:

Sorry... We have detected that your browser is not set up to allow Session Cookies. Our platform uses cookies to help enhance your overall user experience. You cannot log in without them. Please enable Session Cookies and try again. Contact us at ....

What am I doing wrong? Thank you in advanced.

FYI, I can access the web page and login without any issues from a browser. The issue comes when I try to automate the process.

Answer 1

Sounds like the url you're talking to is expecting some specific headers. Try setting the User-Agent header to Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; rv:36.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/36.0 (the default Firefox UserAgent).

Failing that, have a look at the request in Firefox (open the developer tools, and switch to the 'Network' tab before you press the login button) and see what other headers the request has.