Google is a powerful search engine. You can find local restaurants, the flight patterns of rare birds, even look into your
neighbor's bedroom. In the latest example of Google hacking, hackers have discovered a way to use Google to find Web interfaces
for thousands of unprotected Web cameras.
Anyone with an Internet connection can look through, and then manipulate, the lenses of Web cameras deployed across the world.
News of the Google Webcam hack broke publicly in January, after Internet users posted links to Google searches that could
find the Web cameras on popular blogs like BoingBoing.net. Readers soon chipped in with their own Google search strings that
returned links to thousands of Web cameras.
Many of the cameras are deployed for security purposes and stare down silently on parking lots, shopping malls and busy streets.
Billboards and store signs often provide one of the only clues about what part of the world the camera is in. In some cases
though, the links take visitors inside offices, convenience stores, and even homes and bedrooms.
"All you have to do is get a sample of the Web interface, pick up a keyword on the page that's unique to that software and
turn it into a Google query," says Johnny Long, researcher with Computer Sciences Corp., and author of Google Hacking for
Penetration Testers.
Long calls the Google hacking the most overlooked back door into corporate networks. Companies need to develop and then enforce
strong policies to dictate how content gets published to the Web.
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(InfoWorld) - In the litigious world we live in, deploying a unified communications platform in your enterprise could...
