Google unveils new Source Code Search and Hackers immediately take note

[mandy]

Google Code Search: http://www.google.com/codesearch

Google has inadvertently given online attackers a new tool.

The company's new source-code search engine, unveiled Thursday as a tool to help simplify life for developers, can also be misused to search for software bugs, password information and even proprietary code that shouldn't have been posted to the Internet, security experts said Friday.

Unlike Google's main Web search engine, Google Code Search peeks into the lines of code whenever it finds source-code files on the Internet. This will make it easier for developers to search source code directly and dig up open source tools they may not have known about, but it has a drawback.

"The downside is that you could also use that kind of search to look for things that are vulnerable...

full article: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2006/10...oogle.html

Google Code Search is now live -- it gives programmers a single place to search publicly accessible source code. It includes:

    * Support for precise searches using regular expressions
    * Restricts by language, license, or filename with advanced operators
    * A search index that includes billions of lines of code

Code Search crawls and indexes publicly hosted archives (.tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tar, and .zip) and CVS and Subversion repositories, making them searchable in one place

full announcement: http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/...-code.html