Searching security holes

You'll see from my post earlier this morning that I've added some "Out and about in Wiltshire" pages to our shared data system (Also known as a "wiki") on this site. And, I thought, "what better opportunity than to extend our site's search engine to include the database of information in that system?"

But wait. Our shared data system includes not only "public editable" and "public facing" pages, but also pages that are marked "internal only" and are only readable by members of the Well House Consultants team. A search engine that would simply search the database for the desired term wouldn't be sufficient - the search system is another door (a back door) to the data and it needs to be (and has been) secured as appropriate.

Why am I posting this "tip"? Because it's something that authors of search facilities often overlook; I know of various web resources which aren't directly accessible to me, but which I can retrieve information from through search facilities without (or with poor) security. Often, I'll let the web site owner know they've got a problem if I find one of these ... but I do have the feeling that some folks aren't all that concerned about their security. Certainly the holes often remain.
(written 2005-04-04, updated 2006-06-05)

Associated topics are indexed under

A163 - Web Application Deployment - Network Configuration and Security
  [3448] Checking all the systems on a subnet, using Expect and Tk - (2011-09-18)
  [2489] Parallel Pinging, using Python Threads or Expect spawn lists - (2009-11-02)
  [2052] How was my web site compromised? - (2009-02-24)
  [1904] Ruby, Perl, Linux, MySQL - some training notes - (2008-11-23)
  [1712] As different as night and tyres - (2008-07-18)
  [1666] Slow boot and terminal start on Linux boxes - (2008-06-05)
  [1408] Wireless hotel tips - FTP and Skype connections failing - (2007-10-26)
  [1073] Heartbeat script in Perl - (2007-02-09)
  [511] Domain Forwarding - 2 ways of doing it - (2005-11-29)
  [506] What are DHCP and DNS? - (2005-11-27)
  [332] Looking up IP addresses - (2005-06-01)
  [37] Security and Safety - (2004-09-03)
  [11] A bolt of lightning on Multicasting - (2004-08-11)

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