A warning to all

[Happyrever]

Two days ago I put a snippet of code in a post to the forum. It happened to contain a key word (from a web bot point of view) and two days later, using a web search on my web site name, I found a copy of the post, up for all to see on the internet.
Top ranking (second item on first page) as well!
The word was a fragment of my web site name, but not the www. part or the co.uk part, just an innocuous bit in the middle.
The warning is, simply, everything gets looked at and is available on the internet in a matter of hours.

Think carefully what you write in any context these days, not just in this forum, but anywhere internet connected.

[FourthWorld]

Think carefully what you write in any context these days, not just in this forum, but anywhere internet connected.

Hello Happyrever -

Thanks for that post. It's a healthy reminder of how the Internet works these days, in which more traffic is generated by robots than by humans.

As Klaus can attest, this forum - like all forums - is constantly being crawled by hundreds of robots every day. Some of these robots are legitimate, like Google and other search engines, looking for indexable content that adds value to their search services. But the majority of automated processes I see with every server I manage are more nefarious, looking for opportunities for injection attacks, spamming, and more.

Whether legitimate or not, the impact of robots on our lives cannot be overstated. Obscuring URLs where desirable is one way to obviate some of them, but for the most part just being mindful of what's posted is the best approach, esp. since many legitimate and illegitimate robots don't just follow explicit URLs, but also attempt to look for things like folders named "images" within any path they find, and often recursively truncate paths to attempt to explore every directory they can find.

This is a particularly valuable mindset to maintain for the nature of the work we all do, since ever more of our work involves apps that make use of the Internet. Sanitizing inputs, password-protecting sensitive materials, disallowing raw directory access, monitoring access logs for suspicious activity and banning IP ranges - these are all the stuff of normal project management in today's Internet development world.

At the risk of sounding alarmist: Beware the robots! They're out to get you!

[Simon Knight]

I realise that this is a dormant thread but....

At present I am increasing my levels of paranoia by reading Jeffery Deaver's "The Blue Nowhere" having just read his "Broken Window". The plot of both books involve a killer who uses information found on the internet to crack systems and stalk victims. Now while these are works of fiction they have made me think what information is there out there free to view as it were. I wonder what the OP means with his warning, is it that these robots have listed his post incorrectly based on a ket word that happened to be included in the post?

Thanks

[Mark]

Hi Simon,

Basically, the OP says: everything that is publicly available on the internet is... well... ehm... available on the internet for everybody to see I think everyone knows this, but apparently not everyone understands the implications. I think that OP is slightly surprised, if not frustrated, that the text that was written by him personally started a life of its own.

Best,

Mark