Anonymity with Caches Google’s cache feature is truly an amazing thing.The simple fact is that if Google crawls a page or document, you can almost always count on getting a copy of it, even if the original source has since dried up and blown away. Of course the down side of this is that hackers can get a copy of your sensitive data even if you’ve pulled the plug on that pesky Web server. Another down side of the cache is that the bad guys can crawl your entire Web site (including the areas you “forgot” about) without even sending a single packet to your server. If your Web server doesn’t get so much as a packet, it can’t write anything to the log files. (You are logging your Web connections, aren’t you?) If there’s nothing in the log files, you might not have any idea that your sensitive data has been carried away. It’s sad that we even have to think in these terms, but untold megabytes, gigabytes, and even terabytes of sensitive data leak from Web servers every day. Understanding how hackers can mount an anonymous attack on your sensitive data via Google’s cache is of utmost importance.