Protecting yourself from Google hackers
1 February 2007
1. Keep your sensitive data off the web!
Even if you think you’re only putting your data on a web site temporarily, there’s a
good chance that you’ll either forget about it, or that a web crawler might find it.
Consider more secure ways of sharing sensitive data such as SSH/SCP or
encrypted email.
2. Googledork!
sensitive information or vulnerable files.
• Use gooscan to scan your site for bad
stuff, but first get advance express permission from Google! Without
advance express permission, Google could come after you for violating
their terms of service. The author is currently not aware of the exact
implications of such a violation. But why anger the “Goo-Gods”?!?
• Check the official googledorks website on a
regular basis to keep up on the latest tricks and techniques.
3. Consider removing your site from Google’s index.
The Google webmaster FAQ located at http://www.google.com/webmasters/
provides invaluable information about ways to properly protect and/or expose
your site to Google. From that page:
“Please have the webmaster for the page in question contact us with proof that
he/she is indeed the webmaster. This proof must be in the form of a root level
page on the site in question, requesting removal from Google. Once we receive
the URL that corresponds with this root level page, we will remove the offending
page from our index.”
In some cases, you may want to rome individual pages or snippets from Google’s
index. This is also a straightforward process which can be accomplished by
following the steps outlined at http://www.google.com/remove.html.
4. Use a robots.txt file.
Web crawlers are supposed to follow the robots exclusion standard found at
http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html.
BookMark me:||del.icio.us || Digg it || Furl || Google || Spurl || Yahoo MyWeb
Even if you think you’re only putting your data on a web site temporarily, there’s a
good chance that you’ll either forget about it, or that a web crawler might find it.
Consider more secure ways of sharing sensitive data such as SSH/SCP or
encrypted email.
2. Googledork!
sensitive information or vulnerable files.
• Use gooscan to scan your site for bad
stuff, but first get advance express permission from Google! Without
advance express permission, Google could come after you for violating
their terms of service. The author is currently not aware of the exact
implications of such a violation. But why anger the “Goo-Gods”?!?
• Check the official googledorks website on a
regular basis to keep up on the latest tricks and techniques.
3. Consider removing your site from Google’s index.
The Google webmaster FAQ located at http://www.google.com/webmasters/
provides invaluable information about ways to properly protect and/or expose
your site to Google. From that page:
“Please have the webmaster for the page in question contact us with proof that
he/she is indeed the webmaster. This proof must be in the form of a root level
page on the site in question, requesting removal from Google. Once we receive
the URL that corresponds with this root level page, we will remove the offending
page from our index.”
In some cases, you may want to rome individual pages or snippets from Google’s
index. This is also a straightforward process which can be accomplished by
following the steps outlined at http://www.google.com/remove.html.
4. Use a robots.txt file.
Web crawlers are supposed to follow the robots exclusion standard found at
http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.ht
Labels: Information
BookMark me:||del.icio.us || Digg it || Furl || Google || Spurl || Yahoo MyWeb
