Keeping information away from search engines
One of the goals for any website is to be well-indexed by search engines. It’s called SEO, for Search Engine Optimization, and it’s both an art and a science. But it’s also possible to go the other way. Sometimes there are files that you would rather search engines didn’t see. There are methods of hiding these files from the search engines that play by the rules, such as using the robots.txt file, but the first rule is that if you don’t want something publically accessible, don’t host it online.
An article called Things You Don’t Want Google to Find, over at Silicon Valley Sleuth, outlines several points made at a conference on security. The speaker was George Kurtz, the Senior Vice President of the well-known computer security firm, McAfee. In his presentation, Kurtz shows several confidential files and pages that were found after simply searching for them on Google.
These startling finds included payroll documents, social security numbers, confidential files, passwords, even the configuration panels for personal routers.
So, the moral of the story is: if it’s online, it’s public. Please keep that in mind.