Security Through Obscurity Thwarted By Google

Say That Again

from the gotta-know-where-to-look dept

There have been tons of stories about students’ private data accidentally being placed online, so yet another story about that isn’t particularly newsworthy. However, what’s amusing about this story, found by the Raw Feed is the response from officials at Johns Hopkins University to the information leak. The leak was first found by a student who did a Google search, and discovered her info was linked from the search engine results. So, with that in mind, you wouldn’t really expect a school official to defend the “security through obscurity” practice, but that’s exactly what he did: “The file was in a very obscure place. You would have had to gone looking for them.” No, you would just have to use Google, which already did the looking part for you.