Introduction

The purpose of this book is to help you understand the tactics a Google hacker might employ so that you can properly protect yourself and your customers from this seemingly innocuous threat. The best way to do this, in our opinion, is to show you exactly what an attacker armed with a search engine like Google is capable of. There is a point at which we must discuss in no uncertain terms exactly how to prevent this type of information exposure or how to remedy an existing exposure. This chapter is all about protecting your site (or your customer's site) from this type of attack.

We'll look at this topic from several perspectives. First, it's important that you understand the value of strong policy with regard to posting data on the Internet. This is not a technical topic and could very easily put the techie in you fast asleep, but a sound security policy is absolutely necessary when it comes to properly securing any site. Second, we'll look at slightly more technical topics that describe how to secure your Web site from Google's (and other search engine's) crawlers. We'll then look at some tools that can be used to help check a Web site's Google exposure, and we'll spend some time talking about ways Google can help you shore up your defenses.