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5 Ways Google Is Shaking the Security World

Whether you're charged with preventing hacks, protecting assets, stopping fraud or defending trademarks, Google and other search engines present a new mix of risks for everybody in the security game.

Why it matters: Suppose someone is scanning all your ports. Normally, this activity would show up in system logs and possibly set off an intrusion detection system. But search engines like Google have Web crawlers that are supposed to regularly read and index everything on your Web servers. (If they didn't, let's face it—no one would ever visit your website.) By searching those indices instead of the systems themselves, "you can do penetration testing without actually touching the victims' sites," points out consultant Nish Bhalla, founder of Security Compass.

What to do: Beat hackers at their own game: Hold your own Google hacking party (pizzas optional). Make Google and other search engines part of your company's routine penetration testing process. Bhalla recommends having techies focus on two things: which ports are open, and which error messages are available.

When you find a problem, your first instinct may be to chase Google off those parts of your property. There is a way to do this—sort of—by using a commonly agreed-upon protocol called a "robots.txt" file. This file, which is placed in the root directory of a website, contains instructions about files or folders that should not be indexed by search engines. (For a notoriously long example, view the White House's file at www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt.) Many companies that run search engines heed the instructions in this file.

Notice we said "many"? Some search engines ignore robots.txt requests and simply index everything anyway. What's more, the robots.txt file tips off hackers about which public parts of your Web servers you'd prefer to keep quiet. Meanwhile, the information that your pen testers found through Google is already out there. Sure, you can contact search engines individually and ask them, pretty please, to remove the information from their caches. (Visit www.google.com/webmasters for instructions.) But you're better off making the information useless.

"The persistence of these caches is impossible to manage, so you have to assume that if it's there, it's going to be there forever," says Ed Amoroso, CISO of AT&T. His solution? Simple. "Let's say you found a file with a bunch of passwords. Change those passwords."

Then, fix the underlying problem. Eliminate or hide information that shouldn't be publicly available. Long term, you'll have to do the heavy lifting too, by closing unnecessary ports or fixing poorly written applications.

Shock waves: 4 (highest). It's up to you to make sure your company isn't accidentally publishing instructions on how to hack its systems.