Information Warfare: Google Scares the Bad Guys

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July 15, 2006: In the last few weeks, the malware (evil hackers and Cyber War practitioners) community has suffered a serious scare. It became known recently that an Internet security company (Websense Inc.) had discovered that the Google binary search feature could be used to discover where the bad guys were hiding their malicious code and tools. "Binary" is the language of actual programs (occasionally you might open a program file with a reader program and see all the gibberish. That's binary code.) The hackers will now have to take additional measures to hide their stashes of tools and malware, to prevent getting spotted by security people using Google binary searches. This method will still be useful for catching less skillful, but still dangerous hackers.