taking joy in the popping of the social media bubble & other web 2.0 silliness
Apparently the new Google Code Search will also turn up usernames and their password along with various encryption methods used:
Customer databases with names, addresses, zip codes, phone numbers, and weakly encrypted passwords. Ouch. (No link to this one because I don’t really want to get anyone’s data out there.) (thx, jon)
As usual the Internet media has gone ga-ga over Google’s new Code Search feature; however one writer has been astute enough to realize the downside to this.
Google Inc. has inadvertently given online attackers a new tool.
The company’s new source-code search engine, unveiled Thursday as a tool to help simplify life for developers, can also be misused to search for software bugs, password information, and even proprietary code that shouldn’t have been posted to the Internet in the first place, security experts said Friday.
Unlike Google’s main Web search engine, Google Code Search peeks into the actual lines of code whenever it finds source-code files on the Internet. This will make it easier for developers to search source code directly and dig up open-source tools they may not have known about, but it has a drawback.
“The downside is that you could also use that kind of search to look for things that are vulnerable and then guess who might have used that code snippet and then just fire away at it,” said Mike Armistead, vice president of products with source-code analysis provider Fortify Software Inc.
