Introduction

A fairly large portion of this book is dedicated to the techniques the "bad guys" will use to locate sensitive information. We present this information to help you become better informed about their motives so that you can protect yourself and perhaps your customers. We've already looked at some of the benign basic searching techniques that are foundational for any Google user who wants to break the barrier of the basics and charge through to the next level: the ways of the Google hacker. Now we begin to look at the most basic techniques, and we'll dive into the weeds a bit later on.

For now, we'll first talk about Google's cache. If you haven't already experimented with the cache, you're missing out. We suggest you at least click a few various cached links from the Google search results page before reading further. As any decent Google hacker will tell you, there's a certain anonymity that comes with browsing the cached version of a page. That anonymity only goes so far, and there are some limitations to the coverage it provides. Google can, however, very nicely veil your crawling activities to the point that the target Web site might not even get a single packet of data from you as you cruise the Web site. We'll show you how it's done.

Next, we'll talk about directory listings. These "ugly" Web pages are chock full of information, and their mere existence serves as the basis for some of the...