[ic] Moving the admin interface to a different url

[Jon Jensen]

On Sat, 17 Nov 2007, John1 wrote:

> But Google or any other spider will *never* find a page if there is no 
> other page linking to it and there is, and never has been, any record 
> out there of the fact the page exists.  So, by changing its name to 
> asl3owlc5dsflwb *will* prevent it being found unless some lame robot 
> blows a fuse and goes off on some random page search and gets lucky ;-) 
> Of course, if the random page name is leaked somehow...damn it, I'll 
> have to choose another name for my page now :-)

It's surprisingly hard to keep a URL secret these days. You can leak a 
"private" URL to the world by many methods:

1. Follow an offsite link, and the referrer ends up in the next site's 
logs, often visible to the world in traffic reports or to Google via 
Google Analytics, etc.

2. Browser plugins may leak history information to other sites.

3. Spyware may leak URLs to Bad Guys or to some search engine-indexed 
page.

4. If you email the URL to a co-worker or whoever, their email provider 
may snoop on their data (perhaps automatically, as Google does in Gmail 
for targeted advertising), or #1, #2, or #3 above may apply on the 
recipient's computer.

Etc.

Obscurity isn't security, but it's not worthless, either. However, it's 
harder to maintain than it may seem at first.

Jon

-- 
Jon Jensen
End Point Corporation
http://www.endpoint.com/