Is Your Website Really Password-Protected?

Author: Zub
Filed under: Computers & Internet, Information Security
Date: Aug 25,2008

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If you are a webmasters, this is something you must know before letting search engines crawl your password-protected webpages. Most webmasters only think about benefits of letting search engine bots access the contents, e.g. to rank in the search engine results, but what they don’t know is that anyone can access the contents as well. Remember, if search engine bots can crawl and read your password-protected pages, so can real humans.

“It’s one of the simplest hacks we’ve seen in a long time, and the more elite computer users have known about it for a while, but it’s still kinda cool and just a little bit unnerving: A hacker has revealed a way to use Google and other search engines to gain unauthorized access to password-protected content on a dizzying number of websites.”